Samsung Electronics announced on Thursday that all smart televisions it will launch in 2015 will use the Tizen operating system.
The South Korean company introduced the OS at a developer conference last year and said that it plans to increase its usage by integrating it into its products. It was first used on some of Samsung's smartwaches and cameras; the company also planned to use the OS on other products such as televisions, refrigerators and car dashboards.
"We are focusing our efforts on Tizen right now," Kim Hyun-suk, Samsung's president of visual display business, told Reuters in an interview. "We hope that other TV makers will also use it and help build an ecosystem that will help the platform grow."
Samsung developed Tizen as part of its initiative to become less dependent on Google's Android, but it wasn't that successful as the company hasn't integrated it yet on any of its smartphones. In June of last year, Samsung introduced Samsung Z, a Tizen-based smartphone, which it plans to sell first on Russia and India. But a month later, the company announced that it is holding off the third-quarter product launch due to shortage of apps and to "further enhance [the] Tizen ecosystem."
Developers are not motivated enough to create some apps for Tizen, as they don't see a large enough user base. As a response, Samsung decided to bring Tizen to its smart TVs for 2015, which will allow users to automatically search for nearby Samsung devices and connect to them so that they can easily share contents among each other, according to CNET.
"Users can also watch live broadcasts or TV on their mobile devices, anywhere on their home network, even when their TV is powered off," Samsung said.
Samsung hopes the move will convince developers to develop apps for Samsung Z so it can proceed with its product launch and perhaps boost its dwindling revenue. The company did not release a forecast for its smart TV sales.
