After shutting down its in-house book and music services, Samsung is closing the company’s Video and Media Hub, which hasn’t been able to compete with the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Google. This change in Samsung’s US content strategy was first signaled in April when the company announced a deal with Amazon to replace its Hub Books with a customized Kindle application. Hub Books and Hub Music are no longer available and the Video and Media Hub will close Aug. 1. “Samsung has obviously tried, and quite clearly failed. You have to applaud Samsung on one side for trying to be aggressive with its own suite of services, but that isn’t what consumers wanted,” said Paolo Pescatore, director for apps and media at market research company CCS Insight.
One of my frustrations with Samsung Galaxy devices was seeing redundant music, video, and ebook services preloaded by Samsung. Google already offers these services in Android and then there are even more services you can install yourself, such as Amazon. It turns out that no else must have been using these services either as Samsung continues to shut them down. While I didn’t see much of a point in having these services on Android devices, Samsung may have been using them to test out the ability to provide media services for their Tizen line of products. Samsung significantly lightened up on TouchWiz in the Galaxy S5 as well and appears to be working better with Google on their Android phones. If you asked me last year then I would have predicted that Samsung was planning to drop Android and go all in with Tizen, but now I am not so sure. HTC has also killed off their HTC Watch movie service, but I do see that Sony still has their redundant media service options. I am personally going to stick with making media purchases directly from Apple, Google, and Microsoft moving forward and hope that at least these core operating system companies continue to support their content providers. I see there are still games and application hubs on new Samsung devices, but you might want to consider sticking to Google or Amazon for apps and games given the failure of these various content hubs.