TiVo co-founders Mike Ramsay and Jim Barton are pulling the plug on their video streaming start-up, Qplay.
"It is with heavy hearts that we announce Qplay will be closing," Qplay marketing director Ashley Martin-Golis wrote in a blog post. "Our last day of service is next Friday 25 July. We truly enjoyed bringing you the best videos from around the Internet. We had fun building and using Qplay and hope that you did too. Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to keep developing and running the service."
Founded in 2012, Qplay offered an iPad app that allows users to subscribe to content feeds—cleverly dubbed Qs, short for "queues." Available content included YouTube channels, Vimeo, Facebook videos from friends, and professional content from Bloomberg and Comedy Central. The idea was to create a linear feel to the OTT experience, as the service collates all subscribed feeds into one central location — a bit like an RSS feed.
Then, a $49 TV adapter allowed playback in the living room. In late June though it announced that it had decided to turn to Google Chromecast for its hardware strategy. That left its original box plan on the sidelines in the face of an increasingly tough field of competition, which includes Roku, AppleTV, Amazon Fire TV.
In the end, Qplay's move from its own hardware to Chromecast is a smart one, since the company couldn't compete against Google with its own, much more limited hardware. However, the service remained bogged down by a lack of additional content deals — for instance, it didn't support Netflix, Amazon Prime Instant Video or Hulu Plus app. In the end, it wasn't able to survive.
Qplay says customers who purchased the $49 adapter have until 25 July to apply for a refund.
Source: http://www.rapidtvnews.com/2014072234599/tivo-founders-axe-online-ott-start-up-qplay.html
