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Samsung Pushes Its 4K/HDR TV Service in Europe (4k.com)
An anonymous reader quotes 4K.com:
Samsung Electronics has announced that its premium Smart TV content service, TV Plus, is now available for users of Samsung Smart TVs in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom... Owners of eligible Samsung Smart TVs with 4K / HDR capabilities in the above-mentioned European countries now have direct access to premium 4K UHD HDR content offered by Samsung, in partnership with Rakuten TV, and can find their favorite shows using the TV Plus straightforward interface... The expansion comes at what could be considered a strategically well timed moment in the European market, given that 4K TV sales in the huge continental market are steadily growing year by year and are expected to rise to over 17 million 4K TV units shipped by the end of 2017. Meanwhile, TV Plus content has become a success in Southeast Asia since its launch, where 70% of Smart TV users in Korea are watching TV PLUS channels, and 41% of Smart TV users in Vietnam are using TV PLUS.
Subject said it all.
Yet another streaming service but this one's tied to your hardware
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
By "premium content" do they mean that same localized region locked shit you can get from your local cable provider? No thanks.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Korea isn't in Southeast Asia. It's part of East Asia.
I know that Rakuten streaming service, formerly Wuaki, has been eclipsed by Amazon Prime and Netflix. I fear it is not a good idea to have exclusive content on Samsung TVs when you aim to be on as many devices as possible. I hope there is a fat check in order to make Rakuten live longer.
There are competing HDR standards and current standards will very likely not be the final version of whatever standard wins out.
Please, someone explain that to me. Is there anything in that I *do* want to have?
Nice marketing release. "where 70% of Smart TV users in Korea are watching TV PLUS channels". Sure they are.
every day if they want to listen to me good luck the crusted remains just grow higher and higher and hiiiiiiiiiigher.
There isn't that much 4k content around, which probably affects people's decision as to whether it's worth upgrading to a 4k tv set. So giving access to a significant library of 4k content to anyone buying a Samsung tv will probably get them a bunch of sales they wouldn't otherwise have had. There's no mention of cost in the article, I'm not clear if it's free for owners of the specified tv set models, but if so then it seems to be a pretty good deal.
Given that YouTube got disabled on 4yo Samsung TVs, I wonder for how long it will work before they try to leverage it to push you a new TV.
I don't see how this could possibly function well. H.264 encoded video from my 4K cameras (Yi 4K, Panasonic GX-85) is well over 50MBit. Even if they're using HEVC (H.265) for this service, you'd be looking at around 25MBit/s to stream UHD content.
Looking at the average internet connection speeds in Europe: https://www.fastmetrics.com/internet-connection-speed-by-country.php#top-10-comparison-2017
There are no European countries where the average home internet connection is above 25MBit/s. Certainly you can get faster service (the fastest offer I've seen is 400MBit over DOCSIS 3 in metro areas in Germany) but anecdotal evidence says 50MBit is more common.
Why? Because lots of Europeans are still connected via DSL. It's expensive to run fibre, coax is not all that common unless the building is new or it's been retrofitted because someone has cable TV. Phone lines are ubiquitous, and speed advances in DSL and cost reductions in DSLAM mean you can easily get 150MBit/s over DSL now (again, in metro areas).
So, maybe Samsung will have some success with this. But I'm going to guess they won't. Because even on a 150MBit/s connection here in Germany, you still have a "fair use" quota of 300GB/month. Which won't buy you too many hours of UHD content at 25MBit/s.
Or maybe my experience is too Germany specific and other countries don't have these silly rules.
Seriously, is this "news" or just ad copy? It sure does sound like product placement to me...
}#q NO CARRIER
How do you feel about File Allocation Tables?
I feel they're a way for Microsoft to tax users of removable storage. Once the VFAT patent (covering the method used to store long file names in FAT since Windows 95) was due to expire, Microsoft evergreened its patent by introducing exFAT and convincing the SD Card Association to make exFAT mandatory for SDXC hosts instead of UDF.
Do Samsung 4K TVs have an SD slot or USB receptacle whose use for storage would incur a FAT tax?
I've read reports that some TVs capable of IPTV have an interstitial requiring the owner to agree to the software license agreement and activate the TV online before using it even for things other than IPTV. Until the owner connects the TV to the Internet, all it can do is display the nag screen.
"Then just buy a TV that isn't 'smart'." Good luck with that now that the cost of including IPTV has become negligible in a large TV compared to the cost of engineering and stocking a separate SKU without IPTV. Because of this, not all such TVs even have a corresponding model with a similar panel but without IPTV.
What's their coverage of the BT.2020 space like these days?
Ah it's irrelevant: the content will be so over compressed that you won't be able to make full benefit of the display anyway, even if it is's only partial BT.2020 compliant.