![]() ![]() In effort to become a player in internet based TV, Verizon acquired EdgeCast last December. Intel OnCue (that was the official name of Intel TV ed.) is now in the capable hands of Verizon and let’s hope we will see the products based on it very soon. Krzanich, an operations guy who likes to run fabs and sell chips, failed to understand that content is king, getting into the game sometimes tends to be a huge gamble. Intel is a chip company and never had much success in media. We do understand the Krzanich's scepticism, as even mighty Google has failed to transform the TV market with Google TV. Verizon benefits from this internal fight as it gets rather promising TV technology. Intel TV was Ottelini’s baby, his pet project, and it had to go down with him. Following tradition, the new CEO decided to kill off the old CEO's personal projects. Intel's new CEO Brian Krzanich and President Renee James, the duo that took the helm from Paul Otellini. Despite the fact that the project was ready to be showed to editors and that a few thousand people took part in internal testing, the new management decided to sell this division to Verizon.Īpparently the technology was mature and ready to launch and even the deals with content providers and TV networks were in place. According to the Post, both Huggers and Intel declined to comment, so, for now, we are left to speculate.We heard a quite interesting story that led to Verizon's acquisition of Intel TV. ![]() A jump from VP to CEO of Hulu would be big, so it’s possible that Huggers is just fueled by career ambition. Which leads us back to the issue of Huggers’ wandering eye: If Huggers would consider abandoning his baby to lead the company it was built to battle, could that mean ruin for the OnCue set-top box and service? Maybe, maybe not. And apparently it hasn’t managed to do that yet because, although Intel has been drumming up a date that would coincide with the holiday season, it has abandoned that plan and pushed the launch date out into next year. Doing so would allow Intel to bring shows people actually want to watch without the involvement of a cable or satellite company. But whatever that programming is, it isn’t good enough.įor Intel to wrap the project up and start shipping to customers this year, it needed to forge some serious deals with big media companies like Viacom, Disney, NBC Universal, or Fox. That would indicate that the hardware has been developed, the software and user interface is being debugged, and that Intel is able to send at least some programming to the boxes via the Internet. But recent reports have shown that the box has made its way out of the development phase and into beta testing, with thousands of lucky Intel employees giving it an exclusive spin. And since then, OnCue has remained super-secret. Huggers walled off his project from the rest of Intel two years ago to give it a sort of start-up vibe. But Huggers aims to change that perception by giving consumers a revolutionary product that they’ll likely touch every day: a set-top box that plays popular pay TV programs via the Internet. In an interview with Variety, Huggers noted that when most people think of Intel, they think of ‘Intel inside,’ a logical assumption considering the trademark made Intel a household name. After all, if the guy who has spearheaded this project since its beginning is eyeballing the competition, could that mean anything good?įor those not familiar, Huggers has been trying to change the way people think of Intel by developing a piece of hardware that changes the way we watch TV. On its own, this might not seem like damning news – lots of people are gunning for the Hulu CEO position, and why shouldn’t Huggers? But when coupled with yesterday’s announcement that Intel is pushing OnCue’s release out to sometime in 2014 (ostensibly because it is having trouble sealing up licensing deals with networks so it can play popular TV shows through its set-top boxes), it’s hard not to wonder if Intel’s plan to deliver pay TV content directly to viewers over the Internet might be facing some insurmountable challenges. ![]() Fitbit Versa 3Ĭord cutters everywhere are likely breathing a collective sigh of disappointment today as the New York Post reports that Erik Huggers, VP of Intel Media and the big brain behind Intel’s mysterious OnCue TV service, is apparently eye-balling the vacant CEO spot at Hulu – a fact that could mean trouble for Intel’s Internet TV plans. ![]()
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