BlackBerry Eyes ‘Second Program’ Licensing Embedded Software to TV Makers
Producing and marketing unprofitable handsets cost BlackBerry “quite a bit of money” and was “a drag to the bottom line” before the company decided in the fall to exit that business, said CEO John Chen Wednesday at the company's first…
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shareholder meeting since departing the hardware business in September for a royalty-bearing licensing model. It plans soon a “second program” in which it will license its embedded software to a variety of makers for TVs, wearables “or many of the devices that you will get in contact with on a day-in and day-out basis,” he said. Those devices “will not carry the BlackBerry brand, but they will carry the BlackBerry technology on which we will also get a piece of the royalty,“ he said. BlackBerry has “very good relations” with carriers “on the software side,” Chen said. From “their business case,” there’s no rationale for the carriers to “put in the money” to support the BB10 operating system, he said. “For that, I apologize, but this is the crux of the problems that we had in the company, and this is why we had to move on to a different set of operating systems.”