Samsung Launching Foxtel and Olympics On Its 2012 TVs


Samsung’s launching its Australian 2012 range of TVs tonight, and it has just announced that it’ll be bringing Foxtel to its new TVs in July, along with eight free Olympics channels.

Speaking at the launch, Samsung’s Phil Newton, Head Of AV at Samsung, stated that in July it’ll launch a Foxtel application on all of its Smart TV products. From the brief announcement, it sounds rather similar to the Foxtel on Xbox offering, given that Newton stated that Samsung will offer a startup package, entertainment package, sports package and movies. These will be purchased in a linear method and as catchup. Later in the year Samsung will offer VOD services as well.

Newton confirmed that Bigpond customers would be able to access Foxtel on Samsung TVs as unmetered content; when it came to customers of other ISPs he stated that “if you have another supplier at this stage we don’t have a solution; in terms of the streaming the (size of the) streams are not that significant.”

Also in July, Samsung will offer eight “exclusive” (I presume here he means exclusive to Samsung Smart TVs, not wholly exclusive to Samsung) Olympic channels to any series 7 or 8 TV buyer.

If you’ve got an existing Samsung Smart TV, it’s worth noting that Samsung will offer upgrades to its Smart TV range for five years, via a smart TV expansion board. The expansion that’ll cost $149 for each year you want to upgrade it.