Smart TV app hits 10m

Samsung has announced that its Apps TV has recently hit 1 000 registered applications and has passed 10 million global application downloads.

Samsung Electronics recently announced that Samsung Apps, the world’s first HDTV-based app store, has continued to grow both in size and popularity at an impressive rate. Samsung Apps TV recently celebrated the milestone of 1,000 registered applications and soared past the 10 million mark for number of downloads globally. Both achievements show Samsung’s initiative to build a Smart TV ecosystem worldwide.

Online video applications remained at the top of the list of most downloaded apps both globally and regionally. YouTube stayed at the top globally, and was the most popular online video application in the United States and South Korea.

The latest achievements come after Samsung Electronics became the first in the world to introduce a TV app store in February 2010. Downloads from Samsung Apps TV have grown 100%, just five months after reaching 5 million downloads in May 2011. In fact, as of today, the store has reached more than 11 million downloads in total, with an average of 50,000 downloads per day – double the number of downloads that occurred in May 2011.

Such rapid growth underscores the increasing number of active users of Smart TVs, as well as Samsung’s continued efforts to build an ecosystem by delivering a wide variety of high-quality TV content and services through strategic collaboration with major content providers.

As a result, consumers enjoy a wide range of applications across diverse areas of interest like news, entertainment, sports and games. For example, on-demand news applications – BBC News and WSJ Live – offer the top live news of the day in video and text, updated 24 hours a day. Other news applications such as CNBC Real-time app and TIME TV also provide an array of insight, analysis, breaking news, photography and video.

Entertainment applications like the Berliner Philharmoniker provides more than 100 live classical music concerts from one of the leading orchestras in the world, the Berlin Philharmonic. There is also a great selection of sports applications such as ESPN ScoreCenter which has gained popularity from users by providing live score updates, video highlights, and team and player statistics.

Particularly, locally specialised applications have also played a big role in the success of the Smart TV app store. Apps such as Lovefilm in the UK, Berliner Philharmoniker in Germany, and Telstra NRL Game Analyser in Australia have proven to be very popular.

‚It isn’t the number of applications that determines the success of the service,‚ said Kang-hyun Kwon, Senior Vice President, Media Solutions Center, Samsung Electronics. ‚What matters most is the quality and diversity of applications that are available across multiple content categories. We will continue to seek partnerships with content providers who are just as determined to bring a vast range of quality applications to our consumers.‚

Says Justin Shaw, Visual Display lead for Samsung South Africa: ‚This growth is synonymous with our local market where we are continually partnering with local content providers to drive market relevant content and to remain a strong contributor to the app market – in growing our consumer offering.‚ ‚We recently released the News24 TV application and are set to release a number of additional applications in the coming months ‚ which will certainly add to the already strong content available on our TVs.‚

In addition to such strategic collaboration, Samsung Electronics continues to hold developer application contests across the globe to create partnerships with and educate the developer community. Apps Contests were held in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Korea in 2010, and has expanded to countries such as Brazil, Mexico, China, and Southeast Asia this year. Furthermore, Samsung also continues to actively support developers with the distribution of its Software Development Kit (SDK), which allows developers to create TV-optimised applications more easily. Through the Samsung Developer Forum (SDF), the company is encouraging information exchange among developers.

Samsung has succeeded in establishing a Smart TV ecosystem that provides a wide variety of content to consumers and new revenue opportunities to developers, said Kyungsik Kevin Lee, Vice President, Visual Display Business, Samsung Electronics. We will maintain this leadership by nurturing valuable partnerships to continuously integrate hardware and software for consumers.

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