It’s official: people love apps no matter what device they’re on. Samsung has revealed that more than 2 million apps have been downloaded from its Samsung Apps store, which is one of the first app stores made for televisions. After it launched its app store in March 2010, it took leader in Internet-enabled TVs until November to hit 1 million downloads, but it has already doubled that number to 2 million in under two months.
“This achievement and the short period in which it was achieved demonstrates the rapidly growing popularity of applications and content for Smart TVs,” said Sangchul Lee, SVP of Samsung’s Visual Display business. “Samsung’s leadership role in this category has paid off and allowed us to provide new experiences for consumers that are more rich and integrated than any before.”
The store currently has 380 applications and 259 of those are free. Big names like YouTube and Hulu Plus are the most popular apps, followed by ESPN’s Next Level, AccuWeather, and Google Maps. Samsung has been working hard to court developers, even holding contests to garner interest in the platform.
However, though Samsung’s TVs are Internet-enabled, they still lack full Internet access. “We don’t think people want the whole Web browser experience crammed in a TV,” Yahoo senior director of Connect TV marketing Russ Schafer told the AFP in November. “It is a best-of-the-Web not all-of-the-Web comparison; which is similar to how people consume television.”
Regardless, the platform is doing well; so well, in fact, that Samsung is planning on creating a unified platform that could run on their TVs, tablets, and smartphones.
Have you used a Samsung Connected TV? If so, how is the experience?
