Will Apple's iTV Actually Be Samsung's SmartTV?

The narrative seems to have shifted in the interactive television market. For years consumers and tech writers (myself included) have been obsessed with the day that Apple will release its iTV (and debated what it would be called.) But what if that day will never come? What if the fact that Steve Jobs cracked something turns out to have not been enough to enable Apple to deliver the kind of product consumers expect from the company?

The latest shift among Apple watchers towards obsession with a possible iWatch, which may or may not have been stimulated by Apple itself, could signal this very scenario. Far from Apple’s delays with releasing an actual TV (and continuing to “pull the string” on the AppleTV puck) giving Samsung a chance to catch up—Apple has not succeeded in keeping Samsung from pulling away into high orbit. And pulling away it is.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year and then at the Mobile World Congress inBarcelona, Samsung introduced products that are getting awfully close to the kind of all-in-one solution that we have been expecting from Apple. The new F8000 SmartTV with Smart Hub that premiered at CES come in sizes between 46 and 75 inches, with a quad core processor, voice and gesture navigation, and support for apps, internet and social networks. The F8000 also introduces the SmartHub, a five-panel content navigation system that displays live tv, on-demand movies, and the user’s own content library. There are also panels for Samsung’s TV apps and another for built-in video conferencing via Skype.

And at last month’s MWC, Samsung unveiled a new curation product called TV Discovery that allows you to search all of your available streams for programming rather than having to navigate between each separate service as you have to now on most smart TVs. You can also access the app from any Samsung connected device and either watch content or control your SmartTV like a touchscreen remote. The service will be called TV Discovery in most of the rest of the world, but final branding has not been announced for the U.S. market, probably because of possible confusion with the Discovery TV network. Beyond your cable and open internet feeds, TV Discovery will include Netflix and Blockbuster content at launch. Significantly, TV Discovery incorporates machine intelligence to learn a user’s preference based on past behavior. This would mean less searching since relevant content would increasingly be displayed on the opening screen of each panel.

There are a couple of factors at play here, not just Apple’s seeming inability to get high-level content deals done with the cable companies and content owners. Samsung has a considerable advantage in hardware that will be harder for Apple to match much less surpass than in the mobile phone market. Secondly, Samsung has forged a strong alliance with YouTube which has made great strides in advertiser-supported video content. Apple and the cable companies premium paid model may prove less popular with consumers than the free ad-supported model.

The combination of advertising-supported content and machine learning creates the potential for the kind of highly targetable environment that marketers have been dreaming of. In the end, it may be the pull of the advertisers that leads to the rise of the unbundled app model for interactive television.

Apple, can play that game too, and possibly better than Samsung in terms of user interface and user experience—but it’s not exactly the game Apple thought it was playing. And in the world of advertising, Google has a clear advantage. It is possible that an alliance between Google and Samsung on TV could limit Apple‘s maneuvering room in the connected TV market. The next move will probably be Apple‘s. It is expected to release an AppleTV SDK for developers at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) (most likely in early June) for a new TV oriented App Store. I would think this would coincide with the announcement of a new (and hopefully re-imagined) Apple TV set-top device.

If Apple limits its TV product line to a “puck” of some sort (which many people think is the smarter way for it to go anyway) the question will be if it can make an app-enabled TV experience that is significantly superior to the built-in software on Samsung’s SmartTVs to get users to bother to buy and plug the Apple box in. But what if Samsung succeeds at building a user experience that is comparable or superior to what Apple comes up with? Apple could find itself on the sidelines of the next big thing.

Forbes.com