Sweet. Thanks for the info. 
Well… Good luck to you all… This is going to be a “make it or break it” year for SmartThings. Hold on to your potatoes and Happy New Year! 
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I’m so torn about this. On the one hand, I’ll need a new TV in the next 18-months, and I haven’t upgraded to the v2 hub yet. I love the idea of popup notifications while I’m watching TV (as long as I can filter what gets displayed there). I was looking mostly at Vizio, but this would definitely push me to Samsung. I’m kinda the perfect customer for this.
On the other hand, I can’t see how adding an ST user in the form of every Samsung SmartTV sold is good for platform stability. The system isn’t reliable today. How am I supposed to believe adding users will do anything other than muck it up more?
Please focus on platform stability! I want to be excited about this!
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Huge influx of money → put more back into support → put more into dev teams → put more into infrastructure → happier customers.
BUT… it’s probably going to a get a lot more rough before it gets smooth! Hold on to your behinds and let’s ride this out! I’M READY!
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I still don’t understand how will this play with users who have ST Hub as primary controller. I wonder if Samsung will provide a functionality where the TV can be set as a “Controller” or “Router” - If set as a Controller it will behave like a ST Hub, but as a router, it will be detected by the existing ST hub as a device with its own capabilities like “pushtoTV”? I wonder what are the different capabilities that can be included for a device like TV, if it were to be added like any other device.
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The proportion of home consumers that has a SmartThings Hub V1/V2 is trivial (a couple hundred thousand?) … compared to the millions who will buy a new television.
For those Customers who already have a SmartThings Hub … they will just disable that function in their new TV and/or migrate over to it using “the migration tool that will be available by the end of the year”.
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Thats exactly what I was thinking too, but from a technical aspect a TV is more or less placed in the same location - like bedroom, living room etc… And is usually not something of which we can easily change position. A hub on the other hand is more easy to handle. I could place the hub in a location centrally located to expand easily and improve reliability more. More than 90% of the TV customers will be ignorant to this - to them it would be expected to behave like any other plug and play device… Which may actually not help ST much. A hub based strategy would still be important as long as there is enough consumer education - Perhaps they can force the consumers to watch a video that covers all important aspects of the TV the first time its turned on - Just like Amazon Echo.
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Hmmm… When in ST’s history have I heard that argument before?
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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.
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if it is by EOY they better hurry
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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. 
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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).
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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…
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Well they’ll probably change the time out rules to 1 millisecond soon, so that would take care of the overload easy…
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1ms?, yea, that would do it, packets take longer than that to get out of my neighborhood…
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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.