Samsung never wants you to look away from its precious Galaxy S3, Note, or Smart TV. Like, at all. The company just announced “TV Discovery,” a new app that’s designed to help you do just that. With the service, you can use your Samsung device as a virtual TV guide to discover, stream, and search for more content. This means you can search for shows and movies on the app, click to learn more about it, and choose from select content providers who can offer the stream, such as Netflix, Blockbuster, or your local cable provider (if the show happens to be on in real time). This way, you don’t have to check with each provider to see where you can watch the content. Once you select a show, you can also watch it on your mobile device or project it straight to your television. Basically, your Galaxy S3 or Note will become a universal remote, albeit a pretty expensive one.
Other features also include Social Sharing which allows you to tell friends what you’ve been watching, and Personalized Recommendations. “[It] enables consumers to ‘teach’ the service their own personal preferences,” President and Head of Media Solution Center Dr. Won-Pyo Hong said. “The more you engage with the service, the more relevant the returned recommendations for TV, movies and other on-demand entertainment.” So if you don’t want to tell your friends you like watching reruns of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” you’d better remember to turn the social feature off.
TV Discovery will be available in the Korean market by the end of three months of this year, with the U.S., France, Italy, Germany, and 11 other major European countries following suit in the second quarter. The service, which may have a name change by the time it hits U.S. market, is free and should come standard in most Samsung devices going forward.
