Samsung who are looking to expand their content offering in Australia have acquired a struggling TV Company.
The acquisition could be part of a deal to broaden the content Samsung can deliver via their Boxee offering which has still not
been launched in Australia after Samsung acquired Boxee a connected device that
competes with Apple TV last year.
Shelby.tv is tipped to shortly be acquired by Samsung as a result Shelby will shut down its apps after the official
announcement is made.
Shelby.tv was founded three years ago, and raised a total
of $3.9 million despite the injection of capital the Company struggled to survive.
Shelby competed with a number of other video discovery apps,
trying to help people find the best videos shared by their Facebook contacts as
well as the most popular and most relevant clips on YouTube and elsewhere.
The company built a number of iterations of its app, and
even briefly shut down completely to refocus and rebuild the entire experience,
only to re-emerge late last year with a new iOS app. Shelby.tv founder and CEO
Reece Pacheco was very public about these struggles, at one point penning a
Medium post that detailed some of the company’s mistakes.
Shelby’s discovery efforts could be a good complement to the
work Samsung has been doing in the second-screen and TV space. Samsung acquired
multiscreen start up MOVL a year ago, and has since launched a multiscreen SDK
to allow developers to build mobile apps that connect to and interact with
Samsung’s TVs.
