SageTV Acquired By Google

Updated with an Official (but short) Statement from Google:

Huge news for niche Home Theater PC company, SageTV today as the CTO and founder of SageTV announced that the SageTV company was acquired by Google.

No this is definitely not a joke.  Jeffrey Kardatzke, CTO and founder of SageTV, LLC announced today on the company forums that Google acquired their company.  Here’s the announcement from SageTV:

We are thrilled to announce that SageTV has been acquired by Google.
Since 2002, we’ve worked to change the TV viewing experience by building cutting-edge software and technology that allows you to create and control your media center from multiple devices. And as the media landscape continues to evolve, we think its time our vision of entertainment management grows as well. By teaming up with Google, we believe our ideas will reach an even larger audience of users worldwide on many different products, platforms and services.

We’ve seen how Google's developer efforts are designed to stimulate innovation across the web, and as developers have played a core role in the success of SageTV, we think our shared vision for open technology will help us advance the online entertainment experience. We look forward to joining Google, and while we don't have anything specific to announce at this time, we encourage interested developers to email sagetv-dev@google.com.
Full speed ahead!
The SageTV team

Jeffrey Kardatzke, CTO & Founder of SageTV, LLC

I’m very happy for Jeff at SageTV, but this in my eyes is a very bad thing for SageTV users.  I hope I”m wrong about this but I remember the Meedios days when Yahoo purchased them.  I’ll definitely have much more on this topic very, very soon.  In the meantime, you’ll notice the SageTV website has absolutely nothing for us other than the official statement.  The store is down as well which to me is a sign of the end of SageTV as we know it – sigh…  Or… perhaps the HD300 or something like it is the new Google TV.  We’ll just have to see what Google does with things and hope they don’t pull a Yahoo (Yahoo purchased Meedio and essentially destroyed the potential that was there).

Updated with an Official (but short) Statement from Google:

“The SageTV team has developed the latest in media management software, and we look forward to working with them to take this technology to the next level.”

Quick gut reaction from me based on the above statement from Google is this:  I see this as a small, but positive sign that Google plans to at least use some of the good stuff (technology) SageTV excelled at.  But I also think we’ll never see another SageTV update going forward outside of some GoogleTV device.  I’m in the process of asking additional questions to GoogleTV since Jeff is not able to discuss at this time.  Let me know any questions you have in the commets and I’ll see what I can find out.

SageTV 7.1 Release Candidate Arrives

While I was away, SageTV released another update to their SageTV HTPC software, SageTV V7.1.8 and just this week the 7.1.9 Release Candidate.

7.1.8 included several bug fixes and a few new features including:

• New Security API for dealing with security profiles and permissions
• Change the storage of title/episode information for imported Video, Picture, DVD and BluRay Content so the show title field now holds the actual title instead of the relative path plus title.

 

7.1.9 brings the first “release candidate” which means we are very close to 7.1 being released from beta. 

• One significant update in this version is the option to edit the title, episode and description for imported videos.

Additional details of all updates and the download link can be found at the SageTV forums