Exclusive | Promises excitement with Club Samsung 2.0: Malik

In the ever changing technological landscape, while inventions are routine, innovation is also an important mantra to succeed. Considerate of this Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd has launched Club Samsung 2.0, a digital entertainment storefront spanning music, movies, videos & mobile TV under its MSC (Media Solutions Center) division. The application with its intuitive interface provides easy access to content even in an offline mode for a seamless user experience.

Club Samsung’s new media player allows multi-tasking such as synchronous browsing, social sharing, comments, provides recommendations & supports minimized version for both Audio and Video formats according to bandwidth. Effortless browsing with one hand operation- with a jog dial shaped music player, customers can interact with the player using only their thumb for a one hand operation. Universal drawer helps customers access Club Samsung 2.0 functionalities & section with just one hand making the experience effortless.

In an exclusive interaction with Adgully, Tarun Malik - Director of Media Solutions Center-South West Asia, Samsung Electronics spoke more about this innovation, the focus markets for the company plans ahead and more.

Stating that the company’s consistent endeavor is to create a unique user experience for its consumers, Malik believes that Club Samsung is another step in reaffirming that. “The Club Samsung app is very unique as the whole user design is very different and the user can operate it with single thumb, it has a socially integrated network too. We have also created an option where consumers can move their playlist in an offline mode through the SD card and it gets consumed in the app so in spite of changing mobile phones you can use the same playlist”, Malik explained.

Club Samsung scans the device for all available media and brings them under a unified media player. Customers can enjoy their entertainment whether they are connected to the internet or offline without switching media players for a truly seamless experience.

Malik informs that Samsung has invested significant resources and efforts in ensuring that Club Samsung 2.0 delivers a world-class experience to our customers. “Whether it’s the single hand operation or the ability to play online & offline content at one place, there are a lot of features that will excite our customers. We will continue our relentless focus on product innovation to further boost our leadership in the software & services domain”, he added.

We also learn that this app is meant for not only for smart-phones, but will also be available across Samsung devices right from mobile phones, tablets and smart TV’s which, Malik states makes it a unique and seamless experience. “The Club Samsung app is not only limited to music and videos but we’ll also be doing events, concerts, we are working closely with the known music composers Sajid-Wajid to promote local talent in terms of music and promote it on our platform. We are also working with lots of labels; the licensing of the content as well will be given on our platform”, he explained.

Using the Samsung account sign-in, customers can take their profiles with them across devices and form factors. This means that the personalization that customers create in terms of favorites, playlists and their preferences through explicit & implicit profiling, all travel to any device the customer signs-in using their Samsung account. Upto 5 devices are supported through a single user ID that spans Smartphone, Tablets & TVs.   

Elaborating further, Malik said, “Club Samsung 2.0 customers can access content across multiple languages with hundreds of movies and videos, thousands of songs and mobile TV with over 90 channels. We will continue to scale this up aggressively to give our customers the widest possible repository of content. The app will be available across mobile phones, all models from mass phones to premium phones; we are looking at all 17-20 tablet models and all smart TV’s. The features will be up in all these by end of this month”.

Malik informs that while currently they don’t want to disturb our consumers with popping advertisements, hence as of now, they are not doing ads on this platform. Also, he mentions that it’s a low cost offering for the consumers. “We are still developing the roadmap to figure out whether we should have ads or not. The app will offer millions of songs and thousands of movies in regional as well as English and Hindi content. Apart from songs, we will also have devotional bhajans and artis too so we are covering all the genres of music”, he added.

Club Samsung’s content recommendations feature, ‘Discovery’ has also been given a face-lift. Discovery is an intelligent algorithm which lets you select a playlist according to mood, era, language or genre and auto updates the playlist when fresh content is added to the store. Club Samsung supports content in Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi and Gujarati.

Speaking of the target audience and the markets they are looking at with this, Malik said, “Music is a genre which connects all sets of target audiences both - youth or adult. India is a very young country in terms of population. We are very excited to connect with the youth; we feel that’s the future of our country. Our proposition is always aimed to start with the youth and then to serious music lovers”, he said.

When asked about challenges faced through the course of the making and implementation, he said, “There is always a challenge in terms of creating new technologies and being the technology leader we love innovating for our consumers, we are looking forward for more announcements in coming months.”

Club Samsung 2.0 is compatible with 14 Samsung devices currently scaling to 33 devices in a few months. It will be available for download starting Sept 30th 2014 from Galaxy App Store.