We have great news for Samsung smart TV fans who intend to make the best of their big screens for as long as possible. Samsung will reportedly extend its firmware upgrade policy to include smart TVs and offer seven years of Tizen OS upgrades.
Quick recap. At the beginning of 2024, Samsung revealed its plans to support flagship Galaxy phones with seven major OS upgrades for seven years. This new policy allows customers to use their phones for longer without missing out on key One UI features and risking security vulnerabilities.
According to a new report (via KED Global) citing a recent business briefing, Samsung now wants to offer seven years of free Tizen OS upgrades to its latest AI-powered TVs. The upgrade policy will initially cover 2024 models and a few select ones from 2023.
For context, smart TVs from Samsung and other brands get firmware updates for two or three years. This new policy will add more value to the TV lineup by ensuring Samsung TV users get new features and improved security for longer.
Samsung intends to stay at the top of the TV market
The recent report states that Samsung decided to adopt this new Tizen update policy to stay on top of the TV market. The Korean tech giant has been leading the TV space for more than a decade, but the competition has been growing fiercer. Samsung wants to keep rivals like Hisense and TCL at bay.
At the business briefing earlier this week, Yong Seok-woo, president and head of Samsung's TV division said, “We will widen the gap in market share with Chinese companies with the seven-year free upgrade of Tizen applied to AI TVs.”
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The report states that Samsung's new seven-year upgrade policy will cover some 2023 TVs, but whether or not it will extend the policy to older-than-2023 models is unknown.
Earlier this year, Samsung's domestic TV rival, LG, announced it would update a few TV models it released in 2022 “for the next five years.”
With that being said, it would be great if Samsung could cover at least a few key high-end models released in 2022 with this new OS upgrade policy. As yet, the exact details are unknown, so we'll keep you posted as soon as more information becomes available.
