Samsung's 2017 TVs will keep track of your favorite sports teams
New Smart TV software will aggregate sports, music and other content.
CES is nothing if not a show about TVs -- every year, Samsung, Sony, LG and many more parade out incremental upgrades meant to get us to open our wallets and upgrade our screens. In advance of next week's show, Samsung is announcing a piece of its strategy for the year: the company is planning three "Smart TV services" to help people find the all-important content they want to watch. The creatively-named services are "Sports," "Music" and "TV Plus" -- you can probably guess what types of content you'll find in each.
As you might expect, each app is meant to aggregate various types of video and make it easier to find. The Sports app lets you set your favorite teams and receive updates when they're playing. You can get score updates on your TV, but it'll also point you to the various channels that'll let you tune in without having to flip all around your cable box. A home screen will keep track of all the teams you're interested in and show you scores or where to tune in and catch the game.
The music service offers similar aggregation features: you can plug into a variety of streaming music services (including Spotify, iHeartRadio, Napster, Deezer, Sirius XM and Vevo) and search for songs any time. Oddly, it also sounds like the service has some Shazam-type features, letting you identify songs being played on live TV.
The last service, TV Plus, has actually already been out for much of 2016 -- it's an aggregator that uses a "smart electronic program guide" to point people to various shows and movies, regardless of what service they're on. Plenty of other companies are doing this, with Apple recently launching a unified TV guide app for the Apple TV and iOS devices, so it's natural Samsung have its own version of this. The update to TV Plus that's coming at CES is an integration with FandangoNow, a service that offers 40,000 movies and shows.
What Samsung hasn't yet said is if these new apps are coming to older TVs or if they'll only be available on new sets. It's just about a week until the company's big CES press conference, though, so we should find out more soon.
