Boxee Acquired By Samsung For Around $30M | Hacker News Reader

Boxee Acquired By Samsung For Around $30M

techcrunch.com

116 pointschangdizzle48 comments

An exit break-even for investors (money-losing if the funds' cost of capital are considered) and no real return for founders/team.

The hardware-media play is tough.

"no real return" might be a strong statement to make when you take into account retention packages and bonuses that Samsung probably put together.

Sure, none of them are probably retiring, but if they can stick around at Samsung for a while they can probably do very well for themselves.

They did not get 'venture returns.'

This is an example of a "real world" exit - where tangible products and commoditized software intersected with a knowledgable buyer.

Boxee is a nice app. As long as you don't mind giving them a list of everthing you watch and when you watch it:

https://grepular.com/Boxee_TV_Helps_Its_Self_To_Your_Viewing...

Use XBMC. It's just as good but doesn't have all the unnescessary social crap.

This shouldn't be news to anyone because the whole point of Boxee -the very reason it existed to begin with- was to integrate social media concepts into a HTPC. The Boxee devs have been very clear about that - in fact it was central to their advertising back when they first launched.

If Boxee had been secretive about this or even added such features post-launch, then I might understand the authors rant a little more. But complaining that a social-optimized HTPC leaks data is a bit like complaining that Facebook shouldn't be used to back up private photos when it's quite clear that people intentionally use Facebook to share their pictures.

And for what it's worth, the social media stuff in Boxee was actually quite nice (I've not used it since the beta - so I can't comment on how it performs now). I could watch some stuff on YouTube and then recommend it to my friends and visa versa. It worked like a more convenient word of mouth (ie "Hey Bob, I saw this documentary about the territorial habits of cats and I know you like cats so you might want to check it out". I could just switch on my HTPC when I was in the mood for some TV and there would be my friends recommendations). It's just a pity the UI looked like a competition between drunk people to invent the most gaudy interface known to man.

I am the author of that blog post.

At the time that post was written, their privacy policy never stated that they collect this information. It seems to have been updated since to say that they do in fact collect this information, but they don't offer any insight into how long they store it for. Their privacy policy now states:

  "We collect and store information regarding your use of 
  the Boxee Platform, including (i) the content viewed, 
  (ii) the time and date of each viewing, (iii) the 
  application used in viewing the content and (iv) IP 
  addresses, including internal IP addresses, of devices 
  accessing the Boxee Platform"

Also, as I wrote in my blog post, they never responded to my questions that I sent to privacy@boxee.tv.

I find this in their privacy policy quite interesting:

  While we collect and store IP address information, that 
  information is not made public. We do at times, however, 
  share this information with our partners, service 
  providers and other persons with whom we conduct 
  business. We may share hashes of your IP address with 
  other third parties, but these hashes cannot feasibly be 
  reversed into the IP addresses themselves or linked to 
  you individually.

I bet they've done this wrong. "Protecting" data by hashing it doesn't work when the number of possible hashed items is small. There are only 4 billion IPv4 addresses.

I just don't trust them.

I use Plex. It's incredible.

Isn't that a completely different thing?

All three are forks of XBMC, to varying degrees.

Yeah, if I were a VC, I'd be investing in Plex. It is amazing.

All it needs is a torrent site and USENET plugin (i.e. I give it a list of shows I like, and it goes out and snatches/caches them on my server for me automagically) to be utterly magic.

Plex is absolutely great.

I've become a real fan of Plex, recently -- run your own media server, which can include both local content and gateways to online services, which does media conversion (format, bandwidth) to clients -- which include iOS and various desktops and devices. Plus, you can locally cache shows on your iPad as well.

I work in the same building as Boxee’s New York HQ, four floors down – now I know why I’ve been seeing such a marked uptick in the amount of Boxee employees out on the sidewalk chatting excitedly, in like the past two weeks… to my upstairs neighbors, I say congrats!

$30 Million acquisition on $26.5 Million in funding is probably not something they'll feel great to be congratulated about.

Ha, I’ll just empathetically wince at them instead in passing.

Curious to see why the financial numbers don't look so great for Boxee, but if this is true, I think it's a super smart move for Samsung. They're trying to push smart TVs in the living room, but those haven't taken off yet. Grabbing a company that's making some of the best living room hardware makes a lot of sense.

> Grabbing a company that's making some of the best living room hardware makes a lot of sense.

Samsung doesn't need help building hardware. They need help building software. I suspect that's why they bought Boxee.

Software in smart TVs need drastic changes. I won't go over the problems with the ui right now as I feel they are all pretty obvious, but what I think needs to get pushed is the connection between TVs and phones. Samsung is already starting to do this by having IR blasters on the galaxy phones and having ways to use to use the phone keyboards as a replacement for the on screen ones but it can go so much farther.

For example, parental controls should be available through your phone. You should be able to see what your kid is watching and also force them to watch something else "remotely", even if you're on vacation. or maybe they are staying up too late and you turn the TV off for them.

There are many other ideas but that sounds like one of the more useful ones as opposed to being more gimmicky (like gesture commands).

Totally agree. Samsung makes great hardware, but consistently fails at putting decent firmware/software on it. I've had numerous Samsung smartphones and all have performed so much better with pure Android vs. the Samsung "improved" Android.

Their TVs seem to be getting better at least. Some previous Samsung TV's I've owned have been atrocious in the UI department.

Grabbing a company that's making some of the best living room hardware makes a lot of sense.

Have you used a V2 Boxee box? Its honestly almost unusable and underpowered from both a software and hardware perspective, even the remote feels cheap. Their D-Link V1 box was a significantly better but they didn't make it, it cost twice as much as a Roku and was only a hundred bucks less then an Xbox which they couldn't compete with. So they tried to take on Roku on the low end and flubbed it badly.

The one thing boxee has always done better then anyone else is their XBMC overlay for playing back local (or network attached) media. This is also where Samsung lacks, if anything this should be where Boxee's talent can play a part.

I love my little Boxee v1 box. I may be a developer and I may love technology, but I utterly despise anything remotely related to hi-fi, and I want my stuff as plug-and-play as possible. My supposed "SmartTV" from Samsung sucked (aside from the iPlayer integration, which worked really well) -- but the boxee v1 worked a treat. Plug. Scan. Play.

The QWERTY remote was icing on the cake, to be honest.

Glad to see Samsung taking over; maybe now Netflix will work in the UK on it.

I wish I could say I had the same experience with the box. The firmwares were consistently buggy and never quite worked well.

By far the two most frustrating aspects being the forced updates (which were often more buggy or broke features) and the lockups while in sleep. There was nothing more annoying than having to get up and hard reboot the thing every time I wanted to watch something.

Once the Pi and raspbmc became a viable alternative I quickly replaced my boxee boxes because, while not bug free by any means, they're much closer to "just working" than the boxee box ever was.

The one good thing I can say about the boxee box, though, is that its remote was a real treat. That thing worked like a charm.

Agreed, and for the price, really hoping that XBMC's stability issues on the Ouya get worked out.

Shame to hear that about V2, I didn't know it existed. My D-Link Boxee box is frustrating, but lovely. There's a huge list of things I'd change about it if I was creating it (from a software point of view that is), but overall I prefer it to any of the alternatives I've seen, the remote is great, and I'll keep using it for a while. But sad to think that it most likely won't be seeing new software updates (I presume).

I have a D-Link Boxee, and it just got less and less stable over time. I switched to XBMC (openelec) on a Raspberry Pi a while back and haven't looked back.

As a bonus, XBMC interfaces with your TV's remote over hdmi, so you won't even need an extra remote, very wife / gf friendly.

I am not an insider, but had worked at Samsung HQ several years ago. Knowing their tendency to look for lowest price in anything and committee-based consensus building, I am sure it took them a while and hard bargain to reach $30M.

IMHO, such practice only allows them room to acquire non-prime (past-prime) companies. And their culture is largely not compatible with startups in the US. I would be interested to see what happens to Boxee team in 6-months to year down the road.

Seems not a so awesome exit with Launch Date: 2004 and Funding of $26.5M

It isn't a very good exit. Boxee always painted themselves into a corner. They're the streaming device that could never achieve enough scale to gather content relationships.

It was a great device, but plagued by the anathema that is content partnerships with modern media companies. No matter what, if you have to provide consumer content, you're gonna get fucked. Plain and simple.

This is why I fully expect an advance in streaming media to come from a business with another form of revenue (Apple, Google...).

The content companies are intent on smothering any startup with great ideas, because it's a huge threat to their current business model. Like Apple did with iTunes, it's going to take a great idea and a company with a serious war chest to force progress along. Good technology alone is just going to meet this same end, time and time again (in my opinion): Comcast, Verizon, etc. have too much of an incentive to keep things the way they are now, and enough money to keep startups from reaching critical mass.

Edited to add: In a lot of ways, Microsoft might be the first to really break the barrier with the XBox One. They have loads of cash, an audience that the content creators / content delivery companies need and the technology to get it there.

There's less room to fudge funny-money numbers if you actually have revenue.

Smart pickup by Samsung, who has struggled to build software matching the quality of their hardware. Smart TV's just aren't that smart. As Samsung is my electronics brand of choice, I'm hoping this results in a better user experience out of the box.

On my 47" I've used many 10' UIs, XBMC, PS3, x-box, Apple TV, etc. Boxee and X-bar(PS3) are my favorite. Don't know if XBMC or Boxee designers should take the credit, but if Samsung is getting the talent responsible, 30M is a steal.

"Streaming Entertainment Startup Boxee Acquired By Samsung For Around $30M"

So after 9 years of business they are still considered a startup? At what point do you stop being a start up?

After you get big or die or get acquired.

When you are self-sustaining. If you spend 9 years living off of investors then you're still a startup.

Woah, that's low.

Awesome for Boxee, its a great product (actually the valuation seems kinda low to me)

I normally would agree with your low valuation sentiments, but the competition is really fierce (Roku, AppleTV, even Ouya) and I haven't seen more than one Boxee out in the wild.

I've got three in my house. Amazing devices imho.

I keep expecting LG to acquire Plex but maybe Plex has OEM agnostic plans.

I really hope LG doesn't acquire Plex. Plex's polyglot approach to platforms is too valuable to me...

I strongly agree with you.

Don't. The Plex/LG relationship seems to have fallen apart completely, they're barely even updating MediaLink anymore.

Seems like an awesome buy for Samsung, at a bargain too!

I wonder where Samsung is going with this...

The schoolboys from this site are laughing at their faces for such a miserable exit.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

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