Intel’s fledgling telly business has suffered a blow after one of its top engineers quit. Jim Baldwin, who served as vice president and general manager of engineering for Intel Media, has seen that the grass is greener somewhere else and cleaned out his desk. Baldwin's LinkedIn profile, meanwhile, said he has retired from the company.

An Intel spokesman said that the company has "a deep engineering leadership bench" and has taken steps internally to address the transition. "There are no changes to our plans for 2013," he said.

Baldwin joined Intel from Microsoft in 2011 as part of the chip giant's push to hire talent with experience in the TV business. He was "responsible for defining Intel's vision for connected product and services in the living room, bringing together engineering and user experience teams to build products, services, and world-class user experience throughout."

Intel plans to launch hardware and software later this year that let users watch live TV, on-demand, and other content in their homes and on mobile devices. There are lots of hurdles the company has to clear before that happens. It wants the product to launch later this year.

Losing a key engineer could prove to be a setback for Intel as it gets ready to release its hardware and software.