One of the coolest features in all the top of the line home entertainment kit coming to market over the next year or so is the inbuilt IP connectivity for access to online service. In Samsung’s upcoming LED backlit TV range, that content will be coming directly from NineMSN.The decision is interesting, considering that in the US, Samsung has partnered with Yahoo for their TV widgets. According to a Samsung representative, each of the top 5 markets for Samsung are free to organise their own partnerships for the content, and in Australia, they felt that NineMSN was the better fit.
When the TVs hit shelves next month, the only content on offer will be YouTube (without the ability to search) and a weather app. NineMSN’s content will be arriving sometime in August, so long as everything goes to plan. The deal with NineMSN also doesn’t mean that yoyu’ll never see a Flickr widget on their TVs – it’s definitely something Samsung or working on implementing.
Part of the NineMSN content planned is a location based entertainment guide, with information on local cinemas, restaurants and bars all available through your TV, including menus and restaurant types. All that’s required is for you to enter your postcode, and the NineMSN content engine will offer the rest.
Like Panasonic’s Viera Cast, all the content is aggregated on Samsung’s own servers, which means that they can implement updates without you requiring to download an update for your TV.
While it’s still very early days for this type of integrated IP technology in home entertainment hardware, it’s actually a really promising start. Sure, we’ll probably never get a Bittorrent client built in to our TVs, but simple web content is probably all that most people will use.