We knew that R2 studios, a startup from the creators of the Slingbox that was focused on home automation solutions, had been courting acquisition offers from the likes of Apple and Google — but the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft was the company that was able to close the deal. The news breaks less than a week after Blake Krikorian, one of the founders of id8 Group R2 Studios Inc., stepped down from the Board of Directors at Amazon.

The price of the deal was not disclosed, but according to the WSJ Microsoft acquired several patents in the exchange that cover controlling various electronic devices. The report also states that R2 Studios had been working on different ways to distribute and display content on televisions, a focus that lines up nicely with Microsoft's ambitions to make the Xbox the center of the living room. Redmond has been aggressively rolling out non-gaming additions to its console experience in the past year, including numerous content deals and the SmartGlass second-screen application.