Samsung's TV Discovery Service Enables TV to Smartphone/Tablet Streaming
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 22, 2013 4:17 PM EST
I'm not entirely sure I understand the point of MWC this year if everyone is going to pre-empt the show with announcements of their own (or in the case of the Galaxy S 4, wait until after the show to announce). Samsung does join the list of companies that are unveiling announcements prior to the show with the disclosure of its TV Discovery service.
Samsung is in a very unique position in that it is not only a SoC, NAND, display and DRAM maker, but also a significant player in the smartphone, tablet and TV space. If any company is well positioned to understand the needs of the market, it's Samsung.
With its fingers in many pots, Samsung quickly recognized a strong relationship between smartphone/tablet usage in conjunction with simply watching TV. This lead to Samsung outfitting many of its devices with an IR emitter, like with the Galaxy Note 10.1. If your tablet is out while you're watching TV, you might as well use your tablet to control your TV as well.
To increase available synergies between smartphone/tablet and TV, Samsung launched its TV Discovery service. Samsung's TV Discovery is a combination of software and hardware that simply lets you get a good feel for what content you have available to watch on TV as well as aggregated from online streaming sources such as Netflix and Blockbuster. Like many other attempts at TV/PC or TV/gadget convergence, TV Discovery attempts to solve the problem of having tons of content spread across many services by presenting it all in a single app on your smartphone or tablet.
TV Discovery will also have a personalization component as well, to suggest content for you to watch based on your preferences.
The software side isn't anything super unique, as we've seen many attempts at this before. I don't know that another software aggregation service is going to dramatically change anything, but before we reach perfection there are always many iterations of attempts that we have to live through.
Devices equipped with an IR emitter will be able to serve as universal remote controls, just as before.
What is most unique about Samsung's TV Discovery service however is the integration with Samsung TVs. With all 2013 SMART TVs, Samsung is promising the ability to stream content from your TV Discovery enabled smartphone/tablet to your TV and vice versa. Getting content from your smartphone or tablet onto your TV is nothing new, but we haven't had a good way of getting TV content onto your mobile device. Obviously you'll need a Samsung TV for this to work, as well as the Samsung smartphone/tablet, but it's an intriguing leverage of Samsung's broad device ecosystem.
You can expect to see the TV Discovery app ship on 2013 Samsung mobile devices as well as 2013 Samsung SMART TVs.
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chizow - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link
Samsung is a great company to be a fan of, they're the Sony of this generation, a huge conglomerate that makes everything you would want to improve quality of life. But while they are great at looking ahead, they are absolutely terrible at maintaining backward compatibility or supporting new features on old devices.Sure, you can argue this is the hook to get you to upgrade, but I think it's also hurting the adoption rate for some of these features and may eventually upset customers to the point they look elsewhere.
I know first-hand having bought a high-end Samsung D7000 HDTV, one of their first real pushes for the whole SmartTV thing. It's very poorly supported, slow, clunky, with few updates. Even something like streming of Amazon Prime content was promised at one point but totally abandoned now.
Anyways, long story short, don't expect Samsung to fix or patch in anything you don't get when you purchase your device. They're too busy steaming ahead to see what got trampled and forgotten along the way.
daar - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Good points, however I will consider Samsung in a better light than Sony as long as they don't try to shove expensive proprietary formats along with their products.reininop - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Are you sure your TV doesn't support Amazon streaming? I have the C7500 and mine has it, although they put it in a really weird spot. I have a "Yahoo!" button on my remote and that is where the Amazon widget is. There isn't an app as there is for Netflix, Hulu, etc. But it does allow me to stream my prime videos.bluepromo01 - Sunday, December 29, 2013 - link
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GrannyP - Friday, December 25, 2015 - link
I purchased a Samsung UN46 TV in 2013. Now I own a inoperable Samsung TV. A little history, I am 65 years young. I am used to TV's lasting a few years. Over a month ago I started contacting Samsung about a On-Off situation (audio/video) every 5 minutes. My TV was out of warranty 1 year earlier. Several attempts were made on my part over their website and by phone to correct the situation. I could not upgrade the software to determine what was wrong. The Smart TV did not notify me of the need to upgrade firmware. Finally I find that the motherboard is faulty. Three hundred dollars is needed to correct it. Two years and $300.00 just doesn't compute. I have read that others are having similar situations.marjoriejackson - Tuesday, March 6, 2018 - link
Hii Dear,I agreed that Samsung is a brand and it is a very reputable company. It's all products are really good.Recently I purchased Samsung Galaxy J7, and I am facing hanging issues when I run Two applications together it 's not run properly. But my Samsung TV is really amazing I am very happy with this product.
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