Samsung has been the world’s largest manufacturer of television sets for 17 years running. Last year alone, it sold 8.3 million units of its most cut ting-edge, internet-connected TVs worldwide.
But when the electronics giant first tried to expand its reach into distributing movies and TV shows that viewers could buy directly through their sets, the effort generated little more than static. The launch of the company’s TV Plus platform in 2016 was a flop, executives admit, because the platform was built to offer something that most TV set owners didn’t want to buy from Samsung. All of that changed around 2019, when Samsung made a 180-degree shift in its focus: The TV Plus homepage hub added a handful of streaming channels that were available to users for free with a tap of the remote control.
Instead of asking consumers to open their wallets to pay for video-on-demand movies, Samsung was now encouraging viewers to plant themselves in front of the screen to surf through an array of free channel options. And that, it turned out, was a much more attractive offer to the average TV owner. “It was a pretty crowded space,” admits Michael Scott, VP and head of sales and operations for the Samsung Ads division, of the company’s initial effort into video on demand.
“We realized that our ability to serve the consumer was by providing more of a breadth of content than through transactions.” In the extremely competitive TV content marketplace, Samsung has a unique distribut.
