Samsung Tizen TV prototype shows what could be in store for the Smart TV
Samsung has shown off a prototype Tizen TV at a Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco, showing us what could be in store for the company's range of Smart TVs in the future. Although spokespeople at the event were keen to stress that this is merely...
Context & Ripple Effects
Tizen has been inching toward shipping hardware for two years: The Handheld Blog examined it on Samsung's first prototype device back in May 2012, and the platform finally reached consumers this week when Samsung launched the Samsung Z, its first commercial Tizen phone, on 2 June 2014. Days earlier, Samsung had also swapped Android for Tizen on the original Galaxy Gear smartwatch.
First-order effects
- Samsung's Smart TV lineup now has a visible in-house OS candidate: showing a working Tizen TV prototype at its own developer conference gives app developers a concrete third target — phone, watch and television on one platform — rather than a paper roadmap.
Second-order effects
- TV app and content developers face another platform fork to support if Tizen ships at scale, while rivals building Smart TVs on licensed mobile operating systems — the approach Samsung itself just abandoned on the Gear — are pushed toward defending the value of those platforms against a vertically integrated alternative.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the living room becomes the next battleground where hardware makers capture the OS layer themselves instead of renting it, turning Smart TV software from a commodity feature into an ecosystem lock-in play anchored by each vendor's phones and wearables.
The trend: Consumer electronics makers are replacing licensed operating systems with homegrown Linux-based platforms that span phones, wearables and TVs, with Samsung's Tizen push the clearest running example.