How Samsung TV Plus Is Building Hollywood’s New Marketing Channel

The entertainment industry has long been accustomed to measuring success by ratings and viewership numbers, but a new era of streaming services is redefining what it means to reach an audience. Samsung’s TV Plus service, which boasts over 100 million monthly active users across 30 countries, is at the forefront of this shift.

By making entire seasons of popular shows available for free on its platform, Samsung creates a new marketing channel that studios can use to promote their content. This approach flips traditional advertising methods on their head: instead of promoting a program with a trailer, advertisers now showcase it alongside the program itself.

The success of Prime Video’s campaign with Samsung TV Plus is evident in The Rings of Power, which became the highest-viewed on-demand title across all regions where the campaign ran after being made available for free ahead of its second season. However, proving what drives viewers to subscribe, stream the next season, or buy tickets remains a challenge.

Samsung’s auto-play feature on sets raises questions about measurement and accountability. Since TV Plus doesn’t appear in Nielsen’s The Gauge when playback is automatic, some wonder whether this constitutes a new form of viewership that needs to be taken into account.

Nakano defends the practice by citing traditional user behavior: “The channel you were watching automatically played. This was a user behavior expected for the last hundred years of television.” However, this ignores the fundamental shift in how streaming services operate – and what it means to measure success in today’s media landscape.

Incrementality testing, which measures the impact of a marketing campaign on conversion rates, is increasingly becoming the benchmark by which streaming services are evaluated. Samsung claims that Prime Video saw stronger new-subscriber growth in markets where The Rings of Power was available for free, but this data is not publicly disclosed and lacks methodological detail.

Measuring success in today’s media landscape means going beyond simply counting hours viewed on a platform. Studios need to see concrete evidence of conversion – not just exposure. For example, they want to know whether viewers are subscribing or buying tickets as a result of watching content on Samsung TV Plus.

The rise of streaming services is driving the entertainment industry to adapt and innovate in order to reach audiences effectively. The acquisition of Roku by Fox has been touted as validation of this model, but it also raises questions about what role traditional TV will play in the future. Will studios continue to invest in marketing channels that are increasingly controlled by tech giants like Samsung and Amazon? And how will they adapt their strategies to reach audiences through these new platforms?

The era of free TV is here, but it’s not just about giving viewers something for nothing – it’s about understanding how that exposure translates into real-world results. As the rules of Hollywood continue to evolve, one thing is clear: only those who adapt will survive.