Starting this year, Korean electronics giant Samsung says all its smart TVs will be powered by its Tizen operating system, despite early problems with the OS.
Samsung said in a press release that society has undergone a fundamental shift in how it consumes entertainment in that it comes from a wide variety of sources across a large number of devices. To that end, the company has redesigned Tizen to take advantage of this new widespread functionality, claiming to deliver both a streamlined and powerful integrated entertainment experience.
In order to achieve these goals, Tizen-powered smart TVs will now have the ability to search out other Samsung mobile devices and connect to them automatically in order to provide for easily shared content across both platforms. Originally, Samsung wanted Tizen, its proprietary operating system, to exist independently amongst a world of mobile and smart devices powered by Google Android and Apple iOS, but while Tizen was initially unveiled almost two years ago the company has yet to provide a commercially-available mobile device such as a smartphone that’s equipped with the OS.
Right now, Tizen has been relegated to a small handful of Samsung products such as select digital cameras and one or two of the company’s wearable smartwatches. However, this is set to change in 2015, with Samsung preparing to target emerging smartphone markets like India with entry-level Tizen powered devices. With the addition of the Tizen-powered smart TVs in Samsung’s lineup for the coming year, the company could see a resurgence in interest in its own operating system, even in the face of many consumers in established markets being uninterested in smartphones being powered by anything besides iOS or Android.
If Tizen takes off, Samsung hopes to integrate Tizen into a wide array of smart devices like thermostats, home appliances and even cars. Being a major player in the so-called Internet of Things, where everything in a consumer’s house is connected to the Internet and can be controlled remotely, is a major goal for the company, with co-CEO JK Shin remarking that it’s just this sort of cross-convergence at which Samsung excels.
