Angry Birds Flying to Samsung Smart TVs

AMslimfordy
12 years ago
• 39 Comments

That’s right! Samsung announced today at CES International that Angry Birds will be available in full HD on Samsung’s new Smart TVs. Actually, Tim Baxter, president, Samsung Electronics America, announced the agreement by having a conversation with the Red bird on the huge screen behind him, which you can see by skipping ahead to about eight minutes in the video above. As far as we know this may be the first time any of the birds have spoke a complete sentence. I’m just glad there was a translator there to translate his squawk-talk into something we humans could understand. The video is a bit bouncy, so I’ve transcribed it below.

The Angry Birds believe Samsung Smart TVs could be a powerful weapon for us. Larger screens, brighter colors, more power. The pigs should be truly afraid. Tim, please make this happen. That is all.

Let’s address some things that were announced:

• The Angry Birds game will be available through the TV alone — not through an external system like Roku.
• Samsung Smart TVs 2010 and newer will have access, likely as soon as this year.
• The app will be free and be available in full HD!
• Samsung Smart TVs will also have access to an “Angry Birds On-Demand” channel, which will screen never-before-seen Angry Birds animations.

While this is indeed awesome, there are some looming questions.

• One of the biggest questions I have is how will the controls work?
• How will apps be updated and how timely will these updates arrive? I assume there is a simple update mechanism built into the Smart TVs, but how difficult will be be to push these updates as other platforms receive will be the real test (IMHO).
• Which apps will be available? The images I’ve seen show Angry Birds original and Angry Birds Seasons, but not Rio. That makes sense though, as Rio would likely require a separate licensing agreement between Samsung and Fox.

As we find more information, we will keep you posted. Thanks to Austin for the heads-up.

Oh, and one more thing…

I know (Bird Leader here) that only the die-hard Angry Birds fans will read this far, so I wanted to see if anyone ever noticed something. Watch the video above closely and pause at the 09:45 mark. Now play it back a few times. If you look close you’ll see that is not a bird flying through the air. It’s a pig! Now squint and you’ll see a red bird sitting on top of the structure with a white egg just below him. I know, I know, the point here is that the pig in the video has created his own bizarro version of Angry Birds where he’s in control, but as is typical I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t more to this. On more than one occasion Rovio has teased a version where the pigs are in control, not the birds.

Thanks to “anonymous” for pointing out that this scene is this video (links to YouTube), which was shown last summer at ASM ’11.