Fandango Will Offer Embedded Trailers And Ticketing On Samsung Smart TVs

fandango

Fandango is announcing the first partnership that will see its movie ticketing capabilities embedded on Internet-connected TVs.

Mark Young, the vice president of mobile strategy and business development at NBCUniversal (which owns Fandango), said that the service has been available on smart TVs before this, but consumers had to actually download it. Thanks to a deal with Samsung, Fandango will now be directly integrated into the Samsung Smart Hub.

Essentially, Fandango will be powering the Trailers section of the Hub’s Movies & TV section. That’s not exactly what I would have expected, since Fandango is best-known as a ticketing service — sure, it will offer ticketing capabilities as well, but that’s not what it’s leading with. Young described it as the “branded storefront for all movie trailers,” comparing the approach to music video site Vevo.

Although the announcement, which is being made at the Consumer Electronics Show, is the first of its kind for Fandango, Young said the team has been looking beyond ticketing for some time, for example with the launch of original video series FrontRunners and Weekend Ticket.

“We believe Fandango as the movie discovery brand has an opportunity to work with not just consumer electronics manufacturers but also other types of over-the-top delivery services,” he said, later adding, “It’s a definite strategy for us to be more forward-leaning in video as content discovery.”

The embedded capabilities are supposed to launch in the first quarter of 2014.

A few weeks ago, Fandango also announced that 2013 was the best year in its decade-plus history in terms of total ticket sales, visitor traffic, and mobile app downloads.

Panasonic Teams Up With Mozilla For Firefox OS-Powered Smart TVs & Open Standards Push

Firefox OS — The Adaptive Phone — Great Smartphone Features, Apps and More — Mozilla-1

Hours after LG unveiled its webOS-powered smart TV interface at CES, Panasonic has spilled the beans on its own mobile-inspired TV plans — announcing a partnership with Mozilla to use the latter’s Firefox OS (FFOS) and open Web standards ethos to open up the living room’s primary screen.

Firefox OS can currently be found cooling its heels on some low-end phone hardware — mostly in Europe and developing markets in South America. The HTML5-based mobile OS has a mountain to climb in competing with the dominance — and reach — of Google’s Android OS. So Mozilla seeking to push it beyond mobile hardware to expand the ecosystem’s reach makes some sense.

Whether the FFOS interface is going to be compelling enough to bag Panasonic smart TV buyers at the expense of other offerings, or for developers to rally behind an open platform banner for building TV apps and integration remains to be seen.

“Mozilla and Panasonic will work together to promote Firefox OS and its open ecosystem,”  the pair said in a press release today. ”This development aims to deliver more expansive access into smart TVs by leveraging the HTML5 and Web technologies already prevalent on PCs, smartphones and tablets, to offer consumers more personalized and optimized access to Web and broadcasting content and Web services.”

Yuki Kusumi, Director of the TV Business Division of the AVC Networks Company of Panasonic, added in a statement that the partnership with Mozilla will be aimed at ramping up the interactivity and connectivity of its smart TVs — “both inside and outside of the home”.

“Panasonic had been expanding content and services dedicated for Panasonic TVs on our own portal site and our collaboration with Mozilla on Firefox OS will further accelerate various innovations and encourage many new services,” he added.

The forthcoming FFOS-powered Panasonic smart TVs will make use of Mozilla WebAPIs for hardware control and operation — meaning they will also be capable of monitoring and operating other devices, such as smart home appliances.

At the time of writing, Mozilla was unable to provide any screen shots of the FFOS TV interface but the pair talked up the potential offered by cross-leveraging Internet, cloud services and broadcast content, and using HTML5 to write native TV functions instead of having to create embedded programs.

With the launch of this new open platform, next generation smart TVs will gain full compatibility with Web technologies and HTML5 standards used for cloud services and various future networked devices, enabling data from Web services and devices to be easily mashed up on a single application. This ensures flexibility for developers to create new applications and services by using cross-leveraged content from the Internet and broadcasting.

In next generation smart TVs, basic functions, such as menus and EPGs (Electronic Program Guide) which are currently written as embedded programs, will be written in HTML5, making it possible for developers to easily create applications for smartphones or tablets to remotely access and operate the TV. In addition, through the Web services, next generation smart TVs can display personalized user interfaces, featuring the user’s favorites and even add new functions for multiple users sharing the same screen after devices are purchased.

“We are very excited to partner with Panasonic to bring Firefox OS to more people on more platforms. As we see more partners supporting Firefox OS and the open Web, Firefox OS helps solidify open Web standards for smart screen solutions,” added Dr. Li Gong, Senior Vice President of Mobile Devices and President of Asia Operations at Mozilla, in a statement.

“This new platform enables developers and service providers to create a wide range of applications and services to deliver a new user experience. We see a strong alignment between the visions of Mozilla and Panasonic, and by combining our collective expertise and know-how, we will create amazing products together.”

As well as committing to release next generation smart TVs powered by Firefox OS, Panasonic — itself also a mobile maker, albeit last year it announced would be withdrawing from the smartphone market to focus its manufacturing efforts elsewhere — said it will work together with Mozilla to promote the Firefox OS and its open ecosystem approach.

LG’s Bringing Back WebOS to Run Its Smart TVs

LG's Bringing Back WebOS to Run Its Smart TVs

It’s official, LG really is incorporating an open WebOS into its 2014 lineup of smart TVs. That includes everything from the curved 55 to 77-inch OLED models all the way up to the curved 105 inch monstrosity you’ll never get through the front door.

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LG Will Power 70 Percent of Its New Smart TVs With WebOS

LG Will Power 70 Percent of Its New Smart TVs With WebOS

While LG is yet to take to the stage and deliver a big presentation at CES, its Korean wing has just announced the company’s new webOS smart TV plans .

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Deezer music service expands as it launches on Philips and Panasonic Smart TVs

Deezer music service expands as it launches on Philips and Panasonic Smart TVs

Deezer’s currently competing with the likes of Spotify and Rdio to win over the streaming souls of the world, so it knows how important it is to be available in as many countries and on as many platforms as possible. Taking that into account, the music service announced it has inked a deal with Panasonic and Philips which will bring its web-based tunes to Smart TVs made by those companies, similarly to what it did with other manufacturers earlier this year. What’s more, Deezer also (quietly) updated its app on LG and Samsung television sets with improvements to search, an easier way to manage the music library and an option to access your friends’ playlists. Of course, this all only applies to places where Deezer is present — in other words, folks here in the US of A need not to power on their Smart TV and look for the app. One day, perhaps.

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Time Warner Cable Launching TWC TV App On Samsung Smart TVs

Time Warner Cable will launch its TWC TV app on Samsung Smart TVs, allowing its customers to watch content without a cable box.

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LG Smart TVs Support Redbox Instant Starting Today

Redbox Instant was made available to the public this past March and since then, the service has found itself on a small number of set-top-boxes and Smart TVs, it has yet to be as widely accepted as Netflix has been. Today, […]

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Cube26′s Technology Turns Your Face Into A TV Remote

Cube26

The hardest thing about watching TV is finding the remote after a long, slovenly lounge on the couch. Cube26 aims to improve on that situation by turning your TV, phone, or tablet into a face-detecting powerhouse. What does that mean? Basically, your TV or other device will know when you’re looking at it, who is in the room with you, and, more importantly, it will pause the program, call, or game when you leave the room.

Founded by Cornell grads Saurav Kumar and Aakash Jain, Cube26 is still in beta, but from what I saw it works quite well on multiple platforms. For example, in addition to the aforementioned “bathroom pause,” the system can tell when you’re talking on the phone and put other devices on hold. You can also use the system for parental control as it can recognize people in the room and plan content accordingly.

“Other players in vision control are generally focused on one specific area, for example concentrating on hand-gesture detection for TV control or face recognition or body control,” said Kumar. “We believe in making the interaction with devices as natural as possible. For example, when you want to mute the volume for a device, instead of using hand gestures to do some pre-defined pattern, how about you say ‘ssshhh!’ to make a ‘keep quiet’ gesture?”

The company is bootstrapping now and expects to have some traction in OEM hardware over the next few months. They haven’t named any hardware partners, but they were at CES to look for distributors for the technology.

The project aims to take a holistic approach to system interaction.

“For vision control to be natural we believe that the solution is to leverage a wide range of vision signals from the user – both implicit and explicit. Signals include presence detection, gesture, age and gender detection, face recognition and eye tracking, and hand gestures.”

In other words, the system works best with passive, instinctual commands. Unlike the Kinect and similar motion controllers, the system is always watching the room for changes, allowing for a more integrated experience.

The founders came together at a startup weekend organized by Microsoft. They got together for six months of development and focused from making eye-tracking systems for marketers onto “natural control” of devices.

Again, much of this tech is fairly pie-in-the-sky right now, but as the speed of embedded systems improves I don’t see why this couldn’t be embedded right into a TV or phone, thereby adding real smart features to otherwise dumb devices.

Samsung video shows us the design story behind its 75-inch ES9000 smart TV

Samsung’s got one problem, but delicately designing a wondrous $9,999, 75-inch smart TV ain’t one.

Psst… and don’t forget that magic 30 million number.

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Samsung video shows us the design story behind its 75-inch ES9000 smart TV originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Nov 2012 01:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung partners with Spotify, brings streaming music to its 2012 Smart TVs in Europe

Samsung partners with Spotify, brings streaming music to its 2012 SmartTVs

Europeans who have been pining for a(nother) way to bring Spotify into their living rooms can rest easy, now that Samsung is on the case. The pair have teamed up to bring 18 million tracks to Sammy’s 2012 E-Series Smart TVs with a new app designed for the platform. The software will arrive later this year, with existing Premium users finding their playlists already syncing, while those new to the service will be offered a short free trial to coax them into signing up. If you’ve yet to make an investment in one of the displays, the company is also planning to add the functionality onto its Blu-Ray players and Home Theater systems in short order.

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Samsung partners with Spotify, brings streaming music to its 2012 Smart TVs in Europe originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Oct 2012 20:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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