Samsung Tizen OS is coming to TVs from other brands

Samsung offers Tizen OS under license to TV manufacturers. This should expand the market.

LG announced last week that it would allow third-party TV makers to use its webOS platform. Today, its main competitor does the same. Samsung has just announced that it will offer its Tizen OS platform under license for integration into TVs from other brands.

Samsung licenses Tizen OS to TV manufacturers

This is a great achievement for the South Korean giant. A number of partners are already known, such as Akai, RCA, Bauhn, Linsar, Sunny, Vispera, sold in particular in Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

This partnership gives these manufacturers access to Tizen OS features such as Samsung TV PLus (a free TV and video streaming platform), a universal recommendation guide, and Bixby voice assistant.

As with LG when it announced it was licensing webOS to other TV makers, these agreements will also allow the general public to find more affordable connected TV models that typically run Android TV, Roku or Amazon Fire TV. While you’ve probably never heard of the brands mentioned above, the fact that Samsung is opening up its platform in this way means that Tizen should be able to expand to every corner of the globe.

This should expand the market

Samsung Smart TV and LG webOS are great Android TV alternatives. Both offer great search and personalization features, a choice of multiple voice assistants (their own as well as Alexa and Google), and support for Apple Airplay (but not Chromecast). Google TV is a big update to Android TV, but most TVs and streaming boxes like the NVIDIA Shield TV run Android TV, though Google plans to end up running all of those third-party devices on Google TV.