In the latest chapter of the ongoing drama "Net TV swallows Broadcasting," big kid on the consumer TV block Samsung is declaring the new era of "Smart TV." They are holding a "Free the TV Developer Day" at an ISD (independent software developer) event in San Jose. Never mind that most folks on the street don’t know what a "TV Developer" is—let alone the fact that these poor souls need to be "freed." But the Samsung plan that is unfolding at the Fairmont Hotel brings together some industry luminaries, including The Woz, and a cadre of potential software developers. The goal is to introduce the concept of unique applications that will run on the next generation "Smart TVs."

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor

The significant announcement from Samsung is an "open platform" SDK (software developers kit) that offers the new crop of TV application developers unprecedented access to a growing market of potential customers—the folks in the living room watching Smart TVs, preferably Samsung smart TVs. Part of this announcement was a whopping $70M marketing budget commitment by the company to move the initiative forward. (Just to be clear, the company was a bit fuzzy about just how the $70M will be spent and/or if this number is in addition to the existing marketing plans for the global company.) Presumably, the $500,000 in cash and prizes Samsung is offering to ISDs for "the best applications for our TVs" comes out of this budget.

Samsung did say its single SDK for apps will run across HDTVs, Blu-ray players and Blu-ray Home Theater systems. The Apps will support common web standards, like Javascript, XML and support for Adobe Flash Lite 3.1. They are also making the developers’ life easy by allowing applications to be written once and deployed across several (Samsung) platforms, "…ultimately enabling more versatile monetization for developers and a consistent, intuitive experience for consumers."

With this initiative, Samsung is looking to take the Net TV experience up a notch or two by targeting a personalized / customized TV viewing experience, along with content discovery and distribution service to the home, all delivered directly to the living room via the "content rich" Internet-now with a little help from the ISD community.

Along with the $70M to help jump start the initiative, Samsung also made a promise to potential developers to deliver marketing "scale without noise." This includes access to the Best Buy retail channel and Samsung’s marketing muscle.

While we think the app approach to TV viewing is the future of "smart TVs," the real question is does the company (or any single CE TV provider) really have the unilateral power to pull off an Apple Apps store-like ecosystem approach to the big screen? Even Apple is taking a slow and steady approach to this market calling its AppleTV (now iTV) "a hobby." This is, however, likely to change in early September when Apple is slated to make some "game changing" announcements that includes a new low price ($99), new OS and new TV content partners. See this article in PCWorld for details.

Apple’s set top box (STB) will run on any TV, not just Samsung’s. But the Korean TV maker is looking to its recent TV marketing success, that includes 37% market share (US TV market) 60% connected TVs and 80% of +40-inch TVs (according to their company presentation at the event today) to entice partners to develop apps for their products.

Truth be told, (and without a look at the SDK–yet) developers could write apps for both Apple and Samsung markets so Samsung is likely to get some traction from this community. In the looming shadow of the next Apple iTV initiative, Samsung may have decided it is better to launch now before any grand game-changing announcement from Apple.

So here’s to the new era in TV, the "Smart TV" and Samsung’s commitment to dominate the space with just a little help from the ISD community and the creative power they can unleash. Especially now that the developers are all "free" after having attended the Samsung event…