my new ‘Social TV’ experience
It’s smart and social…
So, over the (Royal) Easter break not only did I treat myself to lots of chocolate Easter eggs and even a Royal Wedding street party (thanks mum!), I went out and bought myself a new TV. Well it turns out that not only does my new Samsung D7000 produce crystal clear HD/3D output it’s also very smart and social…
Ok so it doesn’t suggest the next big IPO to invest in or go out and watch the football with me, but with a huge array of very cool and useful Internet-enabled features, my new Samsung TV, has not only made my viewing experience a whole lot more enriched but I think Samsung are on a journey that will make them stand out from not only the competition like Sony, but rival Internet TV services such as those provided by Google and Apple.
Connectivity and Streaming
With built-in Wi-Fi and a very easy set up process I was up and running within a few minutes. The first thing the TV did when it connected to my broadband Wi-Fi was to start updating itself…after the TV came on it instantly discovered my laptop which had ‘media share’ software installed. Media share software e.g. Windows Media Center, allows sharing of music, video and image files stored on your laptop to externally connected devices. This meant without further configuring or cabling I could view almost any media file from my laptop over Wi-Fi. Because the TV could support many different and newer media formats (MPEG4, Xvid, DivX, MKV, MP3, WMA, JPEG) none of my media files needed converting. Ok ok so lots of modern TV sets have this already so nothing new there, but wait it gets better…
Samsung Smart TV Hub (click for a larger image)
The ‘Hub’ Button
While unpacking the remote control, I noticed a button called hub, upon pressing it I was taken to the Samsung Smart TV Hub which is a portal to all the Samsung TV apps and features. Because I enjoy tweeting I immediately went to try out the TV Twitter app. But before I could load the app, I was taken to the ‘Register Services’ screen. This screen allowed me to create a single Samsung TV login account that would store my credentials for social networking TV services that were available such as: Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Google Talk, etc
Tweet tweet... the Samsung Smart TV Twitter App (click for a larger image)
Social TV…tweet and watch!
Once I finished registering and logging into the Twitter service, I immediately found myself immersed into the world of Twitter on my TV where I could start viewing tweets, replying to tweets and almost anything that a Twitter app for my laptop or phone could do. What I really liked about the experience was that I was able to switch from using the full-sized app to a real-time social interactive tv view to allow what Samsung calls a ‘Social TV’ experience. Whenever I wanted the ‘Social TV’ experience all I had to do was press the social button on the remote control and have instant access to my social networking services. What would be really cool would be integration with Windows Live Messenger 2011…but with Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Skype it will be interesting to see what will happen in this space…
Samsung Smart TV Social TV (click for a larger image)
Samsung TV Apps Store
The Samsung Smart TV Twitter app was very slick and I wanted to discover more….so the next TV app I tried out was the BBC iPlayer app, again this was also impressive and I was able to start watching BBC content with very few presses on my remote. The BBC iPlayer HD content was particularly impressive and the programme search worked well and fast. Oh and I would like to point out that I only have a 4MB broadband connection at home and all the streaming worked well with very few judders! Likewise while trying out the YouTube TV app I was very impressed how it worked so seamlessly well with the TV and made good use of the remote control buttons to navigate through the app. I wanted to see what other apps I could download for the TV so I went back to the Smart Hub and navigated to the Samsung apps widget. This took me to the very impressive Samsung Apps Store where I could search and download a variety of cool apps for the TV. I think the UK Samsung app store has about a 100 apps so far, with newer apps always popping up, like the recent Explore 3D App
Samsung Smart TV App Store (click for a larger image)
Two million Five million downloaded TV apps
In a January 2011 press release, Samsung stated that two million apps had been downloaded from the Samsung TV app store. The press release went on to say:
“Samsung reached the 2 million mark within a year of the launch of Samsung Apps and the number of apps downloaded has doubled since November, when it reached one million downloads.”
“After reaching one million downloads, consumers have downloaded an average of 100,000 applications every five days.”
The full press release can be found here
Update: as this article goes live, Samsung are reporting that they have passed 5 million app downloads
A TV SDK* for the developer community
Back in September last year, Samsung ran a competition for developers to build the best looking and most innovative Samsung TV app. The winners shared a pot of 500,000 euros and the voting public got a chance to win a new Samsung TV. These types of initiatives always encourage more and more developers to develop for your platform and now Samsung claim they have over 400 TV apps available in over 120 countries.
After a little bit of digging around, I found that to develop a Samsung Smart TV app, you need skills in JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Developing a Samsung TV Widget seemed quite straightforward; Liam Green-Hughes has a great write up on developing a “Hello World” app on his blog.
* SDK: software development kit
Full Internet browsing with Flash but not HTML5 yet!
Another very cool feature on my Samsung TV is that it has a built-in fully functional web browser. The browser is based on an adaptive version of Google Chrome. The browsing experience is quite good and the experience is enhanced even more so by a built-in pointer in the remote control which acts like a mouse. The menu items in browser are easily accessible by the remote control buttons and the browsers ability to play flash content was a very welcome feature. The only drawback was the browser’s inability to play HTML5 content, but I have read that HTML5 will be fully supported and available in the coming months.
Samsung Smart TV Web Browser (click for a larger image)
Search
A very useful and well thought-out feature of the TV is search. The search function can be accessed directly from the remote control or from the Smart Hub. When I searched for ‘Arsenal’, the search app started searching for all Arsenal related content from Facebook, YouTube, Websites, Samsung TV apps and even my own media library that was stored on my laptop.
Samsung Smart TV Universal Search (click for a larger image)
(credit for picture with Iron Man 2 search: http://www.samsung.com/us/article/the-wonder-of-samsung-smart-tvs)
A Google TV/Apple TV Killer?
Absolutely yes! If Samsung keep investing in TV app development and roll out feature-rich updates with new Internet based widgets, apps and services to the Smart Hub, I think Samsung television owners won’t need to purchase Apple TV or Google TV products. Last week, Samsung UK announced a deal with Channel Five about rolling out a Five on Demand app. These are exactly the type of deals Samsung will need to do to get consumers choosing Samsung over other rivals. The more content providers that sign up with Samsung the more appealing these sets will become to consumers.
Whilst talking about rivals, Sony, will be launching their Internet TV sets in June/July this year. They are offering Internet based features similar to that of Samsung but have one big advantage……..Sony can provide a huge amount of Sony owned content like Hollywood blockbusters and a massive music catalogue. Currently this is available through the Qriocity TV service but I can see this expanding and becoming very feature rich. The only drawback is that the new Sony HX TV’s are much more expensive than Samsung’s identical sets.
So yes, it is smart and social
Ok so it doesn’t suggest the next big IPO to invest in (smart) or go out and watch the football with me (social) but with an array of top notch Internet enabled features, services and lots of TV apps in development, surely Samsung are on a winner and this is certainly the year of the Internet TV — with social being at the heart of Samsung’s offering.
Thanks for reading!
Riaz Ahmed is the Head of Microsoft Development at LBi and can be found here @TheRealRiaz and here LinkedIn
Tags: apple, Apple TV, Facebook, Google, Google TV, Internet TV, Microsoft, samsung, Samsung Smart TV, Skype, social, social networks, Social TV, Streaming, Technology, Windows Live Messenger
