Making Fitness More Engaging on Your Samsung TV

We launched multiple Tizen apps in Samsung Health’s 2020 expansion to TV, bringing native fitness experiences to millions of homes.

Samsung Health

Samsung has been building up a connected ecosystem of products and services aimed at improving your health, beginning with its wearables and smartphone-based experiences which use data about your habits and activity to track your progress. In late 2019, Samsung was poised to expand Health to its Tizen TV platform, enabling fitness tracking based on workouts performed on TV-based fitness apps. 

Working with Samsung, HFC partnered with several fitness studios looking to expand their digital footprint by delivering tailored apps for Samsung TVs. Each business had its own unique content, brand positioning, and goals, which is reflected in the initial offerings. We combined our knowledge of TV-based experiences with the unique value adds of Health to design and build individual experiences that felt right for the brands. To maximize speed and similarity to other technologies in these companies’ tech stacks, we leveraged the Tizen Web Development framework to build ReactJS-based apps 

Obé, a digital-first startup and neighbor of ours in Dumbo, focused on offering a limited catalogue of free content on Tizen that viewers could try out and even have their workouts tracked in the Health app, as a no-risk on-ramp to the full obé offering. 

Barre3, which has a network of physical studios around the world as well as a digital offering, opted for near-parity with their web experience, allowing existing subscribers access to the full content catalogue and tracking workouts both in Health but across other Barre3 digital touchpoints as well.

Echelon, a digital-first streaming company and connected fitness machine company, launched an experience primarily aimed at existing subscribers, initially without integration to their workout bikes but with a limited selection of free content as well as workouts not requiring connected equipment.

Each app logs activity to Samsung Health as well as user and video playback behavior, so we can continue to optimize and improve these apps. These apps launched in June 2020 and are available on millions of TVs, and we’re just getting started.