As Head of Content Services at Samsung Electronics Europe, Dan Saunders is responsible for content strategy across a range of different devices with a particular focus on Smart TV. I caught up with Dan a few days ago and asked him about TV app development, working with content providers and the subtle shift from selling products to services.

KANJI: Hi Dan, so can you tell us a little bit about Samsung's Smart TV strategy?

SAUNDERS: Connected TV, as it used to be called, has been a part of Samsung's strategy since 2008 in Europe and in the last three years we've gone through some pretty big step changes in terms of what the technology platform is capable of. So, in 2008, it was essentially text driven over RSS, static windows and information on news, sport, finance etc. In 2009, we launched our first video services with YouTube.

But where it starts to get really interesting is in 2010 when we launched the BBC iPlayer and Lovefilm in the UK and similar sorts of services across Europe. By the end of 2010 we had at least one non-linear service and one true on-demand service in all of the major European territories.

Now, in 2011, we've really started to build out the service with multiple offerings in multiple countries in Europe. And just as importantly, it was this year that we actually started to talk about Smart TV to customers and make it a central part of our consumer communications.

KANJI: So your message to consumers is moving from "buy my product" to "buy my service". There's a difference isn't there?

There's a kind of perception out there that this is a "box-shifting" manufacturer that's moving into the service industry for the first time and how on earth is it going to manage to deal with these new kinds of philosophies and ways to do business. But of course the reality is that companies like Samsung and any other major consumer electronics companies hire people that used to work in the service industries.

SAUNDERS: Well that's one of the really interesting things that's involved in the work we do. There's a kind of perception out there that this is a "box-shifting" manufacturer that's moving into the service industry for the first time and how on earth is it going to manage to deal with these new kinds of philosophies and ways to do business. But of course the reality is that companies like Samsung and any other major consumer electronics companies hire people that used to work in the service industries. So we've now got a global group of professionals who understand what Samsung needs to do and turn those requirements into something that's understood in that landscape.

We're rapidly developing the competencies to move the company forward.

KANJI: You mentioned philosophies and there's a difference isn't there between Samsung and, say, Sony in the way you've opened up your connected TV platform to content providers. Sony provide only 29 different services on their Bravia Internet Television which they've hand-picked whereas Samsung is much more of an open market place. Is that fair? 

SAUNDERS: Well, I can't comment on Sony but Samsung is certainly operating a market place. It's a walled garden in the sense that you have to build to our technology and make commercial arrangements with us in order to release services but our position is that we want anyone who is capable and willing to build a service to be able to do so. It's true of course that in order to create something you have to work within the parameters of our software development kit but if you look at the architecture of that SDK there's nothing new or surprising it in it. It's basically a mixture of fairly ubiquitous standards like Flash and XML that we've put together in a way that allows those services to best serve the device.

KANJI: And are you able to talk about take up of Samsung's Smart TV?

SAUNDERS: From the perspective of consumers or content providers?

KANJI: Both. I mean, it's a virtuous circle isn't it in that the more content you get from different providers the better the product becomes and the more people that, hopefully, buy it. And the more customers you have the more likely that content owners will want to develop services for them.

SAUNDERS: That's absolutely right. Another way of looking at it - and I'll come back to your question in a moment - is that if you look at the television product line up, we don't sell Smart TV as a separate product category. We have 2 key product categories: Plasma and LED and when you think about buying a television at a certain price point it's going to come with the connectivity as part of that product. So the business problem is less about whether people are going to buy these TVs, it's more about whether they're going to connect them. So, back to your question about engagement: I can't give you specific numbers right now but I can say that we're encouraged by what we're seeing. We feel confident that consumers are actually engaging and connecting their TVs otherwise we wouldn't continue to market Smart TVs as a central part of our television offering.

KANJI: Right -

SAUNDERS: We want to be able to publish figures about engagement, in fact, we're desperate to because we have nothing to hide and the stats are really positive but we're trying to make sure that before we do that we've established a proper currency. This is a new part of the business for Samsung and if you think that 3 years ago the company was selling a TV to a customer and saying "We'll see you again in 5 or 7 years time" whereas now we're saying "Here's your new television and we'd like to have an ongoing relationship with you" it does take a bit of time setting things up so that we can ensure that the data we publish is gold-standard.

KANJI: So from a content perspective, how are you finding providers engaging with your SDK and developing services?

If you look back at the last couple of years, and with the benefit of hindsight, it's quite amazing that we've managed to launch so many services.

SAUNDERS: If you look back at the last couple of years, and with the benefit of hindsight, it's quite amazing that we've managed to launch so many services. I mean, in the early days we were asking these players to build these services at not inconsiderable cost during the first run of the technology and we found a lot of European terrestrial broadcasters and VOD providers contributing almost on a leap of faith. There was no real guarantee that this was going to work. But sometime between late 2010 and early 2011 I think the market cottoned on to the idea that this wasn't a fad, that connected TV was something that would become a central part of the television experience.

From a strategic perspective there are 4 classes of content provider:

1. Terrestrial broadcasters
2. Internet-based video-on-demand providers like Lovefilm
3. The telco that has video services that they want to supply to consumers
4. Everyone else

So Samsung has launched with the BBC and Lovefilm in the UK, Maxdome and ARD in Germany, Belgacom in Belgium, ViaSat and Canal Digital in Scandinavia, Antena 3 in Spain, Cubovision in Italy... and the list goes on.

You can also expect to see partnership announcements over the next 6 months from commercial terrestrial broadcasters and other telcos. All of the major players are actively engaged with the technology.

KANJI: And that makes sense because one of the things that Daniel Danker at the BBC recently said to me was that people want to watch TV on TV - on the big box in your living room.

SAUNDERS: It's quite interesting when you look at central and Eastern Europe because some of them haven't developed non-linear services yet and they're asking, do we really need to develop something for a PC when we can go straight to on-demand viewing on TVs? One of the amazing things about the BBC iPlayer was that it was such a good service right from the start that people were prepared to hunch over their 14-inch screens at their desk in order to watch a programme. It wasn't that this was the natural way of watching TV but that iPlayer was such a good service that it modified user behaviour.

One of the surprising things is that it's not just confined to on-demand video services. We're also finding similar uptake of things like Twitter and Facebook which is really extraordinary.

KANJI: Really?

Providing Facebook and Twitter access on a television does add value. It's challenging perceptions of what the internet actually is. If the internet is available on any device, and it's easy to navigate, people seem to use it.

SAUNDERS: Yes. I have to say that when we launched Twitter and Facebook on Smart TV, I was a non-believer. I really didn't understand why people would want to use such personal services on what is, essentially, a social device. What we've found is that although it may not constitute all your usage, once you sign up to use Twitter and Facebook on your TV you're only 2 button presses away from being able to get the latest updates, seeing what your friends' statuses are and participating yourself. It may not be the dominant way to use these services but providing access on a television does add value. It's challenging perceptions of what the internet actually is. If the internet is available on any device, and it's easy to navigate, people seem to use it.

KANJI: And that's the crux isn't it - navigation? One of the big problems of using any television is that you're limited - out of the box at least - to using a remote control to move around your TV screen...

SAUNDERS: That's right and that's why our SDK technology is so important because it allows a content provider to build a service in a way that properly reflects a television experience. So it might not be as "whizzy" as the service you might find on a PC, it might be stripped back a little, but the idea behind all of these TV app interfaces is that they should aim to get you to where you want to be as quickly as possible. So, many of the apps that we build are predicated on the four directional buttons, "Enter" and "Return".

We're just now beginning to understand some of the tensions between "lean-forward" and "lean-back" and personal versus social devices and you can almost do a matrix that consultants are so fond of doing where you can map all of the different devices to the behaviours to try to understand where the balance might lie.

KANJI: Finally, referring back to your 4 groups of content provider, you said that terrestrial broadcasters are obviously a key set so is it Samsung's strategy to concentrate on getting services from those companies or is to further engage with the other classes you mentioned?

SAUNDERS: We want to engage with everybody! When we sign a contract with a content provider, the roles are clearly delineated. Samsung is responsible for the hardware and the platform and the provider is responsible for the end-to-end service. We're quite realistic about what we do and don't understand about the content business and our technology is great for anyone who wants to provide a service to consumers. We're not forcing models on the entertainment industry. 

You can download the official Samsung Smart TV SDK here.