Google buys up SageTV to bolster Google TV with useful features

Google will acquire SageTV, a company that makes products with streaming and media center-type services. Google is speculated to want SageTV for its DVR and Slingbox-like capabilities for possible integration with Google TV and Google's cloud services.

SageTV's products have filled a niche as just-works media extenders for a couple of years now, allowing customers to serve media over LAN, stream YouTube videos, and stream from PVRs running SageTV's DVR software to a home theater setup. In our own guide, we called it a device that could turn "any networked machine with UPnP support into an HDMI-enabled HTPC." Now that Google has scooped it up, there are a number of SageTV's services Google might be after. Rakesh Agrawal, SnapStream Media founder, speculates that Google bought SageTV in order to add native DVR capabilities to Google TV. But Google TV can already integrate with and automate existing DVRs, leading GigaOM to counter that making DVRs that run Google TV software would be redundant.