Samsung held its Digit-all products press briefing in New York last week to underscore the company’s plans to be first to market with a variety of cutting-edge technologies.
Marketing executives Steve Panosian, Samsung Digital TV, and Mark Knox, Samsung digital products, said the company will continue its underwriting sponsorship of CBS movies in HDTV format this year and is working on other sponsorships for DTV programming.
The company hopes to flag attention to the delivery later this year of its HDTV-capable rear-projection sets that use a new reflective LCD technology, called Ferro Electric LCD, or FLCD.
Knox explained Samsung’s concept for its Home Wide Web initiative that will allow users to control multiple networked devices through TV sets using html programming. Each product will be assigned its own home page that will display interactive operational controls on the TV screen. Products will come with the html pages installed internally, or Samsung will allow users to download proxy home pages from an Internet connection.
Meanwhile, Samsung will ship at the end of April the first NUON-enhanced DVD player, called Extiva. The player, which will sell for $499, will enable the unit to play a new class of DVD video games, in addition to giving turbocharged user control. Knox said Samsung will bundle one undisclosed NUON game title with the player, in addition to a video game sampler disc.
He also said Samsung will ship its DVD-RAM-based DVD video recorder this year and revealed that the company may produce a next-generation recorder based on a new DVD Three format — which will support DVD-RAM, DVD-R and DVD-RW disc-recording formats.
