TV rivalry between Samsung and LG spills over to software behind smart TV

[Photo provided by LG Electronics Inc.]

South Korea’s electronics giants LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics have expanded their TV battlefield to software in powering smart TVs.

LG Electronics recently promoted its smart TV operating system (OS) task force project to a team dubbed WEE (webOS Expansion) to expand the ecosystem of its smart TV OS, webOS, according to industry insiders on Monday.

With the launch of the WEE team under LG’s Home Entertainment, a department that oversees TV content business, LG has set a goal to recruit total 100 members to join its webOS association this year, five time more than last year’s 20.

The company has been supplying its webOs to about 20 TV brands around the world including America’s RCA and China’s Konka Group, and it expects Chinese companies Seiki and Motorola will use its webOS this year.

LG Electronics is confident in expanding its webOS ecosystem with its LG Channel, a free broadcasting service that provides a total of around 1,900 channels in 25 countries. Its ThinkQ AI-powered speech recognition devices will be also provided with webOS.

WebOS is LG’s multitasking operating system for smart devices such as smart TVs that has also been used as a mobile operating system.

With the expansion of the webOS team and clients, LG will be able to have access to more user data, which will be used in creating more customized content services and providing targeted TV ads to different audiences based on viewers’ different interests and preferred channels.

Samsung Electronics late last year announced a plan to supply Tizen OS to other TV companies at the Samsung Developer Conference 2021 (SDC21). Tizen OS is an open source, standards-based software platform for multiple device categories such as wearable devices.

With LG’s ambitious goal to expand its TV platform ecosystem, the competition between the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 global TV companies will spill over from hardware to software.

The competition in the market is expected to reach fever pitch as demand for smart TVs is rapidly increasing in line with the growing popularity of video streaming services. According to market research firm Omdia, smart TV shipments across the world will account for 90.2 percent of entire global TV sales in 2022 versus 79.4 percent in 2019.

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