After the alias fiasco, Samsung unveils its strangest television concept to date

[ad_1]

April was not nice with Samsung. After launching The Fold with the kind of fanfare and grinning grimaces reserved for leaders clearly convinced of finally having a solid victory over Apple, everything collapsed last month. Sometimes, literally, in the case of some examples of the synthesis of Fold.

Of course, Samsung is now forced to delay the deployment of the Fold and could forgive to lick his wounds and keep a low profile rightly, praying the one who deems it worthy that the Fold does not represent another horrible note. 7 debacle for the company.

But no. Samsung is still swinging with perhaps the craziest TV model that it has put on the market so far. The Sero is a 43-inch, 1240-inch TV with 60W 4.1-channel speakers, which presumably targets the Millennials as it swivels from a horizontal orientation to a vertical orientation to display the best possible format for the media social and mobile devices.

According to Samsung, the TV was created to convince the "young" to throw the support of their smartphone on the Sero. But the simple fact that this can be done does not mean that children will come to join the elderly in the living room to happily watch their video box as a happy big family.

Harvey Cossell, head of strategy at the global creative consulting firm We Are Social, thinks it's a complex market study. "They're obviously using it as a way to just test the appetite for such a product," he says.

Emma Caselton, chief creative strategist at SeymourPowell, a design and innovation consulting firm, whose previous clients are Jaguar Land Rover, Superdry and Samsung, makes this clear. "This is the kind of concept that seems obvious to any observer of digital generations."

Cossell explains that 57% of video views come from mobile devices, most of them social. Added to this is the fact that 80% of social media is used on mobile phones and that for you, bingo, you have every interest in choosing a vertical television. But that misses the whole picture.

Although there are already a lot of vertical videos, what We Are Social has found when working with clients such as Adidas, Google, Netflix and Intel is an inherent laziness. In simple terms, most people should not be bothered, for example, to switch their phone to landscape orientation to watch a video clip in full screen.

"People are too lazy to take landscape footage on their phones and turn them on to look at them properly, without the mailboxes, up and down," Cossell said. "With this sluggishness of consumers to redirect their mobile phone to optimize content, will there be so much laziness out of your couch? [or pressing a button] return your TV in the correct orientation? This seems to be a very important thing to understand. "

Then come the problems of quality and interaction. Television can be high definition, but the content will probably not be. If you project social content on a 43-inch screen, there is a good chance that it is appalling because the social video is compressed.

"When the majority of what goes on our phones is an information rather than an image, would people want to see a Twitter feed of this magnitude? How would you navigate through this information?" Caselton said, adding that it could possibly work in dual-screen mode, with content being displayed on one screen and comments added on another.

"But when you view this content on your mobile, the experience is really" leaning forward, "" continues Cossell. "It's interactive, as opposed to sitting on a couch that is very passive. When you slow down on longer content in social mode, the other's finger always goes over the slider at the bottom. either scrub forward, if it's a boring kind or a talking head, to go to action, or rewind to watch the action again. "

What this means is that consuming media on mobile is more of an active participation than vegging to watching content on the couch. "You change the viewing experience by removing it from your cell phone and placing it in the living room," says Cossell. "Now, what are the implications of this? Is it going to be as" leaning "as when it's on your cell phone? When you're on your couch, the viewing experience is inevitably passive . "

As this set is so clearly aimed at "young people", there are two other crucial points to consider, for example, who is Gen Z or a millenium going to spend that money on a television? Will they like to share their content with the whole family? "Think about how many of them still live at home – if you're 18 and you still live at home, will you be watching social content in the TV lounge with your parents? Or are you more likely to be on your cell phone at the other end of the sofa or more likely in your room with your laptop and your cell phone? "Cossell asks.

"The connection we have with our phones is very private," says Caselton. "They are small, carried on us, they have a monograph and screens difficult to share. The scale of a television borders the semi-public and becomes a very different territory for personal content. The more she grows up, the less she becomes private. Are we going to be comfortable displaying our images on this big screen? "

However, it is true that the entertainment industry is wondering how to create good content for the vertical format. The NBC and the NFL in the United States have experimented with this type of content for sports fans to use on their smartphones. A new series of Snapchat shows, designed for mobile consumption, is expected to launch later this month.

The best 4K TVs for games, movies and more in 2019

NewTV, supported by major Hollywood studios and television companies, from Disney to Fox, Viacom, Sony and ITV, plans to compete with Netflix by creating mobile-specific content for 30 years. The company has raised a billion dollars in seed money and its launch is expected by the end of the year with a selection of original and abbreviated series. All episodes will last about ten minutes. But this format and length seem to go against the very idea of watching such media at home.

However, the very idea of "NewTV," and not the final name of the company, looks like a desperate attempt by mainstream media to engage with new users, while the habits of watching are turning away from their traditional foundations. . And the same can be said of an electronics company trying to make a TV for a generation that is not interested in owning a TV.

Even the technology is not new here. Pivoting screens have already been installed, most recently in the Portal video call feature of Facebook, compatible with Alexa, +. Then there was Surface Hub 2 from last year. The idea is not even new for Samsung, which rotates a few screens, as well as its Flip interactive whiteboard.

As the portal, the Sero, which will go on sale in South Korea at the end of the month, will be equipped with a microphone, but oddly enough, it will not have a built-in camera. Another disadvantage is that Samsung's virtual assistant, Bixby, will unfortunately be integrated.

But for this to work, Samsung has at least chosen the right territory to follow the Sero. "With their hyper-connectivity and high-tech consumption, Koreans are among the world's most tech-savvy and provide a great test bed for this idea," Caselton said. "It will be interesting to see if vertical television has traction in this region or if it will be dedicated to the cemetery of novelty technologies."

At the request of the BBC if the Sero was likely to be released outside of South Korea, a spokesman for the company was a non-user. "Samsung will review the global launch plans after the launch of Sero in Korea," they said. Refreshing, nothing turns.

More beautiful stories from WIRED