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Samsung hopes that its range of Smart TVs will replace pay TV and laptops in the lounge room within six months, by supplying video content and web browsing though your connected television, an industry conference in Hobart heard today.
(Credit: CBS Interactive)
Smart TV is a new category of television that uses an internet connection to provide additional content such as web browsing, social networking, apps, live channels such as Bigpond TV and video-on-demand.
Evan Manolis, AV group manager at Samsung Electronics Australia, told the Korea-Australia-New Zealand (KANZ) Broadband Conference that applications such as Bigpond TV will help popularise smart TV.
“It expands the story of smart TV and gets people understanding how the TV works and how it all brings convergence together, and there’s no more need for content on set-top boxes or laptops. It’ll all be one within the next six months,” Manolis said.
Manolis said that Samsung has conducted extensive research on what people want out of a smart TV.
“They want to ensure that the user interface is easy, they want to make sure that the experience they get on a laptop — the way they search the internet, the same way that they social network — that the experience is at the same level or better, and that’s what we’ve delivered,” Manolis said.
Both Samsung and LG have launched their 2011 ranges of smart TVs in the past month.
Tim Barnes, LG’s senior marketing manager of home entertainment, told CNET Australia in April that IPTV will be “hugely important” in the future, but that it faces some initial hurdles.
“As with any technology there’ll be bumps, and one of the key challenges will be speed and being able to stream, but as the streaming technology and the packet technology improves, that barrier will go away,” Barnes said.
Samsung’s Manolis says that it plans to circumvent data usage issues by keeping the customer informed of how much data its services use as well as looking into providing data bundles of “up to 500GB” through carriers like Bigpond, with its televisions and set-top boxes.
