Samsung Video Hub

~ the obituary ~

The Galaxy S III sold in Turkey in enormous numbers. Video Hub, the movie store Samsung put inside it, had close to nothing to sell here, because film licensing is negotiated country by country and Samsung negotiated for the countries where the margin was. You could open the app on a phone bought in Ankara and find a storefront built for somebody else's catalogue. That is the normal shape of a global hardware company shipping a regional media business.

Video Hub arrived with the Galaxy S III, announced on 3 May 2012 and in European hands by the end of that month. It came as part of a set: Music Hub, Game Hub, Readers Hub, Video Hub, each one a Samsung-run storefront sitting next to the Google-run storefront that was already on the phone and already better stocked. Rentals ran around three pounds, a standard-definition purchase around eight, and the early hands-on reports could not find any high-definition titles at all.

Samsung had tried this before. Media Hub had been doing the same job in the United States since 2010 for Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab owners. Video Hub was the attempt to take the idea everywhere else at once, on the back of the best-selling Android phone the company ever made, and then it also turned up on the Smart TVs.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

Badly, and the reason was visible on day one. A Samsung-branded video store on an Android phone has to beat Google Play on price or on catalogue, and it did neither. Engadget's write-up from the launch could not identify what the store was for beyond the fact that Samsung wanted to own the transaction. For two and a half years it sat on hundreds of millions of devices as the second icon you ignored.

Where it did get used was the living room. Samsung Smart TVs carried Video Hub too, and a TV has no Google Play to lose to, so for some households this was the only store on the set. Those are the people the shutdown hit hardest, because a phone can install something else and a 2013 Smart TV mostly cannot.

~ the thirty seconds ~

The wind-down ran on a schedule that reads like a DRM engineer's revenge. Smart TV owners lost the ability to rent or buy on 30 November 2014. Phone and tablet owners lost it on 1 December. Everyone had until 30 December to get their library down.

Getting it down was not a download. You had to re-download each purchased file, then play at least thirty seconds of it, on each device you wanted it on, to the limit of five devices. The thirty seconds is a license check: the player phones home, the server says yes, the key is written locally, and after that the file works without the store. Miss the window on a device and the file on it was a brick. Samsung told Smart TV owners to finish watching anything they had in progress and gave them no equivalent instruction for keeping it.

Nothing transferred to Milk Video, which Samsung launched in late 2014 as the replacement. Your purchases were not an account balance, they were licenses to a store that had closed.

~ what went with it ~

The same notice killed WatchON, Samsung's remote-control and content-discovery app, in every market except the United States and Korea. Samsung's official line was exactly that: "On December 31st, 2014, Samsung WatchON will discontinue full service in all markets, except the United States and Korea." Content bought through WatchON would stay reachable through whichever provider's own app had sold it, which is a polite way of saying Samsung had been a middleman and was stepping out from the middle.

Milk Music, the sibling that survived Video Hub, made it to 22 September 2016. Milk Video went in the same year. The Hub family that the Galaxy S III was sold on had been dismantled within four years of that phone's launch, and Samsung has not seriously tried to run its own media store since.

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