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The ´óÏó´«Ã½ has today launched its ´óÏó´«Ã½ News product for connected TV which will bring video news clips via the web to living-room TV screens.

The ´óÏó´«Ã½ News product for connected TV combines existing video and text content from ´óÏó´«Ã½ News Online and will initially be made available on Samsung's range of Smart TVs. It will subsequently be made available on a range of connected devices over time.

The development reflects the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s strategy to deliver greater value for money for licence-fee payers by repurposing ´óÏó´«Ã½ Online products for a wide range of devices. The launch aims to tap into the growing internet-connected TV market, with predictions that almost 36 million TVs with built-in internet capability will be installed in UK homes by the end of 2016 (1).

The ´óÏó´«Ã½ News product for connected TV has been designed as a complement to the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s live 24-hour news channel. Editorial teams in the newsrooms will curate clips around the clock to run alongside text-based news from ´óÏó´«Ã½ News Online – all started, stopped, and navigated via the remote control.

Phil Fearnley, General Manager for News & Knowledge in ´óÏó´«Ã½ Future Media, said: "Internet-connected TV is developing as a medium and presents an exciting and engaging complement to our existing TV services. As we've seen with ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer in the UK, and our global smartphone applications, audiences enjoy the freedom and flexibility of ´óÏó´«Ã½ services at a time and place that suits them – whether on the move or on the living-room TV.

"Looking forward, we are particularly interested in creating seamless, personalised, and location-aware experiences of ´óÏó´«Ã½ News across all connected devices – mobiles, tablets, computers, and TVs. Internet-connected TV is still in its infancy, but innovations such as this hint at the long-term creative potential of the internet as a medium."

Steve Herrmann, Editor of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News website, said: "By combining the latest and best reports in video from the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s unrivalled newsgathering and TV news teams with the extensive range of up-to-the-minute reporting from the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News website, this service broadens the availability of the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s world-class journalism to audiences in a new and innovative on-demand format."

The ´óÏó´«Ã½ News product for connected TV will be available free of charge and will be accessible from within the Samsung Apps Store on Samsung Smart TVs from today (Friday 17 June). ´óÏó´«Ã½ Worldwide will also launch an international version of the product which will be advertising supported.

Notes to Editors

1. Source: 3 Reasons Ltd, Spring 2011. This number projects sets technically capable of connection; numbers of actual connected sets will be lower, depending on broadband penetration, consumer behaviour etc.

• Interactive TV via Ceefax launched in 1973
• Next-generation Ceefax "´óÏó´«Ã½ Text" launched in 1999 and evolved via ´óÏó´«Ã½i to become ´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button – digital text and video streams delivered on digital broadcast platforms
• ´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button is the UK's most popular interactive TV service, with 12 million users per week
• As the trend towards convergence continues, viewers' familiarity with ´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button will be leveraged to break down the traditional boundaries of linear and on-demand
• In its recent the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Trust indicated that costs for the re-versioning of content for IPTV should be captured within the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button service licence budget:
• The ´óÏó´«Ã½ is responding to growth in the internet-connected TV market and the appetite for optimised services this has created and intends to repurpose its core online products for emerging platforms

NI