TV manufacturer Samsung is hoping to boost 4K TV sales by giving consumers a good deal more content to actually watch in 4K, announcing a new deal with Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) to deliver its original series and some movies in Ultra High Def (UHD, or 4K), starting in October.
Samsung also has a 4K deal in place with Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX), announced in April, but that includes just two series, Breaking Bad and House of Cards. Both Amazon and Netflix's content will be available on Samsung 4K sets worldwide.
The manufacturer said it will also be delivering its UHD Video Pack to European consumers, which includes 40 UHD movies, curated in conjunction with Fox Home Entertainment and pre-loaded into a 500 GB media player, according to a Forbes article. European users also will soon be able to get 4K feeds from Spain's Wuaki.tv, Germany's Maxdome and Italy's CHILI.
That's a good deal more content than its U.S. UHD Video pack, which features just eight movie titles, Forbes noted.
The announcement, made just ahead of the IFA tradeshow starting next week in Berlin, is a clear indicator that Samsung wants 4K television sales to get a move on. The technology has been commercially available for over a year, but sales originally were tepid.
The market, however, appears to be changing.
Price is now much less of a factor in TV sales, with an IHS report saying that prices are falling to a global average of $1,120, down from $7,850 in 2012. And shipments of 4K TVs are reaching record levels, with 2.1 million shipping in the second quarter of 2014 alone, a new NPD DisplaySearch report found. That figure is well above the 1.6 million 4K sets that shipped in all of 2013.
But now, content needs to catch up to UHD sets' growing popularity.
For more:
- Forbes has this story
- CNET has this story
- see this BI Intelligence post
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