Advanced Television

Samsung signs Comcast and Time Warner

January 7, 2011

From Nick Snow @ CES

Hard on the heels of Sony’s deal with Time Warner Cable to put its programmes on its proprietary platform, Samsung has signed both TWC and Comcast, and their programmes and guides will be available through the Samsung Galaxy Tablet and Smart TVs.

Samsung President B.K. Yoon had already explained the Samsung philosophy of ‘Human Digitalisation’ and of working with partners when he called to the stage Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast and Glenn Britt CEO of Time Warner Cable (last seen taking a bow at the Sony conference). Each showed off the integration of their EPGs to the Galaxy tab (for Xfinity in Comcast’s case) and demoed the usual synchronised playing, jumping to and from the Smart TV and, in TWs case, live TV.

“Glenn and I are thrilled to team up with Samsung. The Samsung Smart TV will be a revolution,” said Roberts.

The Xfinity TV app for the Galaxy Tab turns it into a guide, a video player, and a remote all in one. Social media features will be added soon. With the TWC app, Briit says: “I can access live TV directly on this tablet, without a set-top box. Ultimately, our customers will have access to their entire channel lineup on the tablet.” And all TW content will be delivered over IP to Smart TV without a set top box, a first for US cable.

Ultimately, Samsung wants many content partners and its aim is clear: “”Anytime, anywhere, on any screen. We realise that we cannot realise this dream by ourselves — we will take the collaborative path. Samsung plans to develop a cloud-based platform… we are dedicated to making our devices the best gateway to storing, sharing, and playing content from the cloud,” says Yoon.

More big names were to come – Samsung is certainly a draw- as Jason Kilar of Hulu popped up to announce it would soon run on Android. Then it was Shantanu Narayen of Adobe to talk about Adobe Air for multiscreens: “Samsung is the first device manufacturer in the world that’s making these developments a reality across all the screens.” Samsung’s Smart TVs will support Flash. Flash is a “must-have for anyone playing web-based content,” says Yoon.

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