Samsung nurtures SmartTV apps, picks Party Shots

Samsung is a long-standing proponent of finding new ways to use the TV. It began delivering RSS feeds to its connected TVs in 2008 and launched an Apps Store in 2010. Now it says it has more than 1400 apps, averages 50,000 downloads daily, and expects to hit 20 million cumulative downloads in January 2012, double the 10 million milestone it reached in October 2011.

The consumer electronics giant, while reportedly planning to show off hardware later this year that supports Google TV, continues to build out its own platform and application ecosystem. At CES 2012, it unveiled the Samsung Evolution Kit, which promises annual upgrades to its SmartTV platform. (For more, read here.) It also announced the winners of its Free the TV application challenge, a two-year old initiative to encourage developers to use its SDK (latest version, 3.0).

The first-place winner of this year’s challenge is Party Shots, an app created by itaas Inc. A software development and engineering company with cable industry expertise, itaas actually had been looking for a Smart TV incubator project when its developers learned about the contest last fall. “It was really serendipitous,” said Jim Elayan, itaas Vice President of Marketing and Business Development.

The challenge that Samsung had posed to the developer community was to create a converged app that enabled interactivity between a Samsung Smart TV and multiple screens. Elayan said it was a question of “how to use the TV for something different.” Or more specifically, given the direction his team took, “How do I make the TV a value-add to a party?”

The Party Shots app allows users to take pictures with their mobile devices and send them immediately to a Samsung Smart TV, where they display as a real-time slide show. “The best analogy is disposable cameras on the tables at weddings,” Elayan said. “We’re doing that, but with smartphones connected to a TV.”

In a typical scenario, a party host would use his or her smartphone (Android or iOS) to initiate a Party Shots session by scanning the app’s QR code on the Smart TV screen. The handshake between devices establishes a link to the MAC address of the TV. Participating guests then scan the code, which redirects them to the Samsung Smart Hub gateway if they lack the app.

With code scanned, app downloaded and photos snapped, guests then can forward those pics—along with captions or personal comments—to the event’s virtual scrapbook. As a cloud-based app, however, instead of simply transferring photos to the TV, it first directs the photos to a server. From that point, they could also populate a Flickr or Picasa account. (Future iterations will include options for high or low photo resolution and for sharing the scrapbook via the cloud.)

As winner, itaas took home $100,000, a 65-inch LED D8000 series SmartTV, a Galaxy Tab 10.1 and two months in the recommended section of the Samsung App Store. Samsung also paid for Elayan to attend CES 2012, where he demoed the app in its booth. Altogether, he said the project took eight weeks, involving between seven and nine team members. “What we’ve learned has been almost invaluable,” he said. “The money was an added ‘wow.’”

Elayan underscored the positive energy the exercise generated. “It was so much fun that we are now using projects like this as retention tools for our engineers,” he said.

The second place ($75,000) winner, Let’s Play Stop, was an English language improvement game developed by Goodwill Community Foundation (GCF) International. Third place ($50,000) went to the developers of Freqsho (freakshow) an audio-visual music app. Both finalists received a 55-inch D8000 SmartTV, a Galaxy and two months in the product information area of the App Store.

The submission gallery on Samsung’s “Free the TV Challenge” website includes twenty-one total entries, a quick review of which indicates projects of uneven quality. Judging the contest were three Samsung executives, two industry analysts and one early stage investor.

As for Party Shots’ prospects, Elayan said the app could attract advertisers interested in particular venues (weddings, baby showers, birthdays, etc.) but that its economic viability would depend upon reaching additional platforms. Samsung did not bind its winners to an exclusive agreement.

According to MagnaGlobal, there are only 5.4 million SmartTVs in the U.S. market. The global market appears much larger. A report from Research and Markets estimated total global shipment of smart TVs in 2011 at 64 million units. How many of these devices are actually connected is another question.