Samsung Gives Up On Plan To Create One Remote To Rule All Content

A lot of us no longer just watch traditional TV on our television sets. If you’ve seen this episode of House Hunters, maybe you’ll fire up your Amazon Fire Box, or Apple TV, or Roku to see what’s streaming on Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, Hulu — all different services each with different interfaces and content listings. Samsung was hoping to introduce a remote control device that would put all of this info at your fingertips without having to switch around between apps, but that dream appears to have died.

Variety reports that Samsung’s Perfect Experience (or “PX”) project appears to have been scuttled, with the company letting go of several members of the team tasked with building the device.

PX was supposed to be a tablet-like device that allowed users to scan through content listings and descriptions from multiple service providers. So instead of having to go on to your TV, scroll through Netflix until you find something to watch, only to decide you’d rather rent something from Amazon Prime, the process would be more seamless.

Samsung had put the team from Boxee — the streaming device company purchased by Samsung in 2013 — on the PX case, but Variety says that dozens of employees from this team, including former Boxee CEO Avner Ronen, are no longer with Samsung now that the company has apparently given up on the PX dream.

The company was apparently once keen on launching PX this year and packaging it with new high-end Samsung TVs, but the remote’s debut was repeatedly pushed back.

According to Variety, a big hurdle facing PX was getting multiple content providers to agree to being on some sort of shared interface. Given how much time and money each of these companies sinks into their individual user experiences, it’s not surprising that Samsung had trouble getting the services to say yes to having their content listings placed side-by-side in a manner they didn’t have control over.

Another problem with PX may have been with Samsung itself. The project was being developed in the U.S., which apparently displeased some in Samsung’s Korea-based leadership team.

For now, the dream of a single device with multiple content listings on one screen is still a fantasy.

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