Samsung Smart TV Gets Personal With Consumers, Kate Upton and Flo Rida

From Wednesday night’s Samsung Smart TV Launch party in New York, video of Kate Upton, a walk-through of the software features of the Samsung Smart TVs for 2013 and the hip-hop musician Flo Rida.

By Nancy Ayala
Managing Editor 

NEW YORK — On Wednesday night, Wall Street got a lesson in cool and what’s next for Samsung with the electronics giant’s Smart TV launch party in the Financial District.

At the launch party, inside the Museum of American Finance, Scott Cohen, National Product Training Manager for Samsung, stood before a 65-inch LED F8000 Samsung Smart TV to demonstrate the myriad features offered on the state-of-the-art screen. 

This is a new opportunity to “talk to the TV,” in different languages, and to download TV shows from around the world, he told Social TV Daily.

Bilingual Hispanics can watch Good Morning America and, with a wave of the hand or a voice command, switch to Univision’s Despierta America.

A fan of YuppTV? Indians living abroad can catch their beloved channel from their Samsung system, connected to the Internet.

With its “Smart Hub” technology, the Samsung sets organize content into five “screens” to help consumers navigate through content and to personalize choices, including:

• On TV: While you watch a channel, you can see personalized suggestions for what to watch next.
• Movies & TV Shows: Missed the season finale from your favorite TV show or want to watch actress Jennifer Lawrence’s films before her Oscar-winning turn in Silver Lining Playbook? Just say “Jennifer Lawrence,” and you can find where to find her films using one of five Samsung content partners, including Netflix, Hulu, VuDu, Samsung Media Hub and Blockbuster.
• Music, Photo & Clips: Organize your favorites on your Smart TV and other social media tools.
• Social: User-created content can be shared, including content from YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other social media providers.
• Smart TV Apps: Start with Samsung apps, then add favorite apps to organize for yourself and make recommendations to others in your network.

To demonstrate, Cohen gamely put up his thumb and said the Samsung Smart TV will read your “like” and add it to your Facebook so friends can see that, too.

For those who “like” 2013 Sports Illustrated cover girl Kate Upton, she added luster to the launch party, explaining the ease of the Samsung Smart TV to reporters, adding that watching sports is one of her favorite pastimes. To everyone’s delight, she later joined the main attraction onstage, rapper Flo Rida, who gave a proper shout-out to Samsung toward the end of the show – the reason why an estimated 200 gathered.

To that point, the LED F8000 TV series is available in 46 inches ($2,199), 55 inches ($2,699) and 65 inches ($2,999); prices may vary. Samsung’s flagship plasma TVs have been updated, as the new Plasma 8500-series.

Citing the ease of growth in the retail digital market and accessibility for consumers, Cohen mentioned how Amazon is a major supplier of Samsung products, even their oversized products. 

Smart TVs will make it easier to watch “what you want, when you want it,” and to discover things you had forgotten or did not know existed.

Welcome to the future of TV watching.