Samsung

Broadcasters kept their focus largely on a NextGen TV narrative headed into this week’s CES in Las Vegas, where around 100,000 attendees are expected. Sinclair is discussing its own flurry of ATSC 3.0 developments, while the demise of pay TV service Evoca was one setback in the NextGen saga.

Smart TV maker Samsung has unveiled a new version of its TV Plus streaming offering. The free, ad-supported TV service has reach to 24 countries and 465 million devices globally across TV and mobile, the company said. (Photo: Samsung)

Sinclair Broadcast Group thinks it has found a cost-effective solution in conversion technology that can take standard-dynamic range (SDR) content and transform it to high-dynamic range (HDR) content in real-time, a technology it demonstrated at last month’s NAB Show.

Teed up by riveting playoffs, NBC will rely on the same core technical setup it employs for its regular-season NFL games when it broadcasts Super Bowl 56 on Sunday. “The more you can stick with what got you to where you are, the better off you are,” says Drew Esocoff, the big game’s director. Above, the Infinity Screen by Samsung in SoFi Stadium (Photo: Will Navarro).

The Long Island newspaper has remade itself as a multimedia news producer with a two-studio, multimillion-dollar production operation and a team of MMJs ramping up extensive video coverage. (Newsday photo)

Major set manufacturers Samsung, LG and Sony glanced over NextGen TV in their presentations, although Hisense and Tablo unveiled new NextGen-enabled products in this year’s heavily slimmed-down event.

In a surprise move, Samsung Electronics replaced the heads of its three major business units and merged the company’s mobile and consumer electronics businesses into a single unit.

Samsung — one of the largest purveyors of ACR (automatic content recognition) data derived from smart TVs used by that ad industry, if not the largest — is hedging its audience measurement bets by going with the industry’s tried-and-true measurement brand: Nielsen.

While late to the ad game compared to the likes of Roku and Amazon, original equipment manufacturers like Vizio, Samsung and LG are hurriedly building out their advertising businesses as ad dollars flow into connected TV.

As streaming TV becomes the default viewing option for Americans, the makers of streaming devices are taking the place of cable operators as gatekeepers, deciding what streaming services will be available to viewers. Increasingly the gatekeepers include not only Roku and Amazon but smart TV makers such as Samsung. NBCUniversal is learning that the hard way as it battles to get its Peacock service onto Samsung TVs.

ATSC President Madeleine Noland weighs in on the technology’s COVID-hampered rollout, the importance of peripheral receiver devices for viewers’ embrace and prospective nontraditional uses cases for the spectrum as a broadcast revenue driver.

Samsung has launched a new service intended to help advertisers better engage target audiences, regardless of how they watch TV, by measuring the combined impact of linear and streaming campaigns. General Motors was a partner in the pilot project for Samsung Measurement.

Lee Kun-hee, who built Samsung into a global giant of smartphones, televisions and computer chips but was twice convicted — and, in a pattern that has become typical in South Korea, twice pardoned — for white-collar crimes committed along the way, died on Sunday in Seoul, the South Korean capital.

Samsung Ads, the advanced TV advertising unit of the TV set manufacturer, is launching Samsung DSP, a self-serve demand-side platform. The platform will give programmatic buyers access to exclusive CTV inventory, as well as offering targeted audiences and data from across 45 million households.

The massive NBCUniversal Boston Media Center in Needham, Mass., houses the company’s NBC and Telemundo stations plus regional cable news and sports networks in a new $125 million, 160,000-square foot headquarters. “It’s a complete game-changer,” says one GM of the greenfield build.

The annual consumer electronics bazaar offered an important stage for fledgling NextGen TV this week, while also allowing varied glimpses at 5G, anticipatory technology and acres of beautiful new screens including the Samsung Sero that shifts from a horizontal to vertical perspective.

Set makers including Samsung and LG will support the mode, developed to disable motion smoothing and display movies in the way the filmmakers intended.

Samsung’s 2020 business strategy for TV sales is simple: 8K or bust. With its QLED 4K TV sales being undercut by budget 4K TVs, Samsung plans to shift the market again, to a format that has (so far) very few competitors, but also very little native content.

PBS and Samsung are putting finishing touches on a pair of apps that will make it easy for owners of Samsung smart TVs to stream national and local PBS shows. Samsung apps for PBS Video and PBS Kids, both co-branded with local stations and enabling viewer donations, will be released in Samsung’s Smart Hub app store within the next two months.

The South Korean consumer electronics and appliance marketer pumped $11.2 billion into advertising and sales promotion in 2017, a 13% increase. That moved it ahead of packaged-goods powerhouse P&G, which spent an estimated $10.5 billion on advertising and other marketing costs in the year ended June 2018, little changed from the previous year.