Samsung Reveals Entire 2016 Smart TV Line-Up will be IoT Ready

Hmmm… When in ST’s history have I heard that argument before?

2 Likes

I’m now highly suspicious of any feature in a TV that locks me into a single manufacturer’s ecosystem.

Having bought a top-range Samsung Smart TV in 2012, with features such as screen sharing onto a second screen (Samsung tablet or phone), within a couple of years nearly all my devices are Samsung. Then they made a change to their screen sharing app, so you can no longer share the screen onto a tablet, and I now don’t have one of the key “features” that sold me on the TV.

So I don’t trust Samsung any more, which is one of the reasons why I buy non-Samsung sensors/devices to connect with my Smartthings hub, so I can at least swap out to some other system such as Vera or Fibaro when they inevitably remove the “features” that were present when my hub was purchased, Z-wave perhaps !

If/when my TV breaks or needs replacing, I certainly wouldn’t want that to have a knock-on impact on any home automation that exists elsewhere in my home. To me, the HA hub really does not belong inside an expensive TV. When I do replace, I will be primarily concerned with price & picture quality, not the distinguishing features that I now know, to my cost, are not always there for the life of the product you buy.

SmartTiles incidentally, gives me a great ST user interface which I display on my Smart TV, and for that it doesn’t matter which brand of TV I have.

3 Likes

if it is by EOY they better hurry

1 Like

We haven’t seen any details yet (and probably won’t until CES) but my own expectation, given industry trends, is that this becomes a different platform option. Not an expansion of the current hub. Current hub customers who have/buy a tv with SmartThings will be in the same position as one who now has both V1 and a V2 hub. They can use either or both, but not both on the same network. And not with the same devices. But we’ll see.

My own expectation, as I’ve mentioned, is also that the television version will support fewer devices, a lot less custom code (if any), but will be much more reliable. And with some cool Samsung camera integration.

But both of those are purely guesswork. We’ll see what actually gets shipped.

1 Like

Yeah, the first time I read the announcement, I thought that a TV would be included to V2 via a usb stick. But it doesn’t seem the case. The new TVs are actually hub v3 with a stick! And that explains a lot, the speedy progress they’ve made to fix V2 problems.

1 Like

Without preempting our announcements too much, this is essentially the case. This opens another door for someone to become a SmartThings user. This is the first of many “hubless” ways to join the SmartThings platform.

If you’re a current user, this shouldn’t change much (or anything) for you. If you develop on our platform, this will open up more users for the solutions you develop.

Expect to also be able to control your 2015 and 2016 Smart TVs as “Things” as well (some models excluded).

4 Likes

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the stuff announced at CES is expected to hit the store shelves no later than October, which means that it has to be ready for mass production by August at the latest. Which, in turn, means that SmartThings has about 8 month to develop essentially another version of the hub. At least we now know where the bulk of their development resources will be tied in for the next 8 month. :frowning:

1 Like

Some stuff announced at CES is available immediately. There’s no fixed rule, it’s up to each presenter.

That is not a future tense, my friend, how long before v2 was announced at CES, have we gotten a sense that they have ‘bigger fish to fry’ instead of concentrating on v1? I stand by your own words, we are the guinea pigs of SmartThings (the beta testers).

2 Likes

This is such a bad a idea. No need for the $99 hub. How much is the extender? What is the differences between the TV and the hub version.

TV only supports cloud/wifi integrations, stick adds in ZigBee/zwave devices, probably Bluetooth, though that wasn’t specifically mentioned in the developers meeting.
No price was mentioned for the stick.
While the TV with an ST hub of sorts has merit on a number of levels, your flexibility in locating the radios for ZigBee/zwave devices are severely restricted.

Lets play some numbers here, just off the top of my head.
So Samsung sells 2 TV’s per second, that’s 173 thousand per day, which seems improbable, but I can’t dispute it. So lets take half of that as a realistic starting point, say 80K, then say that UK and USA are 25% of their global market, now we’re at 20K. And of that 20K, 10% will actually create an ST account and activate the HA features. Now we’re at 2000 new users per day. Even if Samsung doesn’t start shipping these until Q2 2016, we’re easily talking about .5M new ST users by this time next year.
As @bravenel mentioned in another thread, I wouldn’t want to own load management…

1 Like

Well they’ll probably change the time out rules to 1 millisecond soon, so that would take care of the overload easy…

1 Like

1ms?, yea, that would do it, packets take longer than that to get out of my neighborhood…

1 Like

Probably microseconds (μs), if it takes a millisecond for a packet to depart your neighborhood, your provider is terrible (way beyond even the worst) or probably has a non-terrestrial connection vector.

Ummm, not really, but in any event no one’s being serious at this point…

3 Likes

@JH1, it’s New Year’s eve! Happy New Year everyone…

3 Likes

In multiple places it has been mentioned that the extender stick is free.

1 Like

I think it’s a wasted opportunity, and probably a step in the wrong direction – both in terms of development cycles as well as hardware. I messed around with an enBlink USB stick at some point and it was actually pretty bad, in spite of the software / interface being pretty slick – because it was designed for a large, high-resolution screen.

People love “consumer grade” pretty-looking hardware that you can hide somewhere, and that’s a terrible idea. I am happy for my nasty looking Ubiquiti hardware, which is not necessarily pleasant but guarantees 100% strong WiFi coverage through my house. Similarly, I will GLADLY pay twice what I paid for the ST hub for a device the size of a shoebox with 20 antennas sticking out, if it will guarantee me coverage through the house and no issues with message delivery.

1 Like

Wasted opportunity for who? Samsung can claim that their TV are HA ready, and ST can claim that they reached every corner of the world. It sounds like a dream come true for both. Who cares if it’s functional or not, Samsung refrigerators can serve you calendar reminders, just like the dogs can bark when you open a door if you have a ST hub. Trust me, looks good on the paper for both, what else can you ask in a happy marriage?

2 Likes

I still contend that SmartThings needs 2 million hubs sold and/or activated smart TVs by the end of 2017 or the product will be killed :gun:. The entire business model relies on massive scaling to be successful.

Samsung sells millions and millions of high priced electronics and appliances… Not a few hundred thousand.

1 Like