As part of a signature product exhibition today in New York City, Samsung has announced an expansive new partnership with 20th Century Fox studios, which will tackle the woeful lack of UHD content currently available for the tech titan’s growing lineup of UHD TVs.
The new partnership expands on an earlier licensing agreement with the powerful movie studio, which landed a small selection of UHD films revealed today at the show such as X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and A Night at the Museum, which will be stored in Samsung’s new set-top device, the UHD Video Pack.
According to Samsung, this latest agreement will deliver “a variety of UHD content to consumers,” via Samsung’s smart TV system, the Smart Hub. Reading between the lines, the agreement appears to be another Band-Aid solution for the current lack of 4K/UHD content. While manufacturers continue to move forward with an expansive line-up of UHD TVs at enticingly low price points, they still have no real answer for the fact that the wide majority of content is not available at the eye-scorching UHD/4K resolution rate, which offers four times the resolution of 1080p HD.
Kyungshik Lee, who has the ominous title of Senior VP of the Service Strategy Team of Visual Display Business for Samsung, had this to say about the company’s latest deal, “Our strategic partnership with 20th Century Fox is a great example of how the industry is working towards bringing UHD content to end-consumers in the most efficient way while accelerating our ability to provide a full UHD ecosystem.”
Perhaps more revealing about the latest news is what he didn’t say: Just how much content will be made 4K/UHD-ready, what other licensing agreements Samsung has in place, and how it intends to deliver such content efficiently to the growing audience of UHD viewers.
While the agreement sounds like a good start, we’ll have to wait and see how it plays out before we start patting either Samsung or 20th Century Fox on the back just yet.
