ONE of the great things about having a large flat-panel smart TV is that you’ve got an awesome TV in your lounge. One of the downsides is that you’ve only got one TV and everyone wants to use it.
Electronics manufacturer Samsung announced a feature at CES this week which might help alleviate that problem.
Samsung have said all their 2020 8K TVs will feature Multi-View, which is capable of diusplaying two totally different images on screen – one of the demonstrated features involved tapping a Samsung Galaxy phone against the side of the TV, allowing the devices to interface and bringing up the phone’s Twitter feed next to the main picture.
Given how prevalent “second screen” use is (let’s be honest, most of us have probably found ourselves scrolling social media when the TV is on) it’s a good way to still be able to keep an eye on what’s on the big screen (say, a sportsball match) while keeping an eye on Twitter or Instagram or whatever (I am told TikTok is a popular thing for The Teens at present) too.
According to Samsung, “Multi-View ensures consumers won’t miss a thing on either screen by projecting the screen of the consumer’s mobile device onto the TV alongside a separate window for their TV content.”
“With 14 different layouts, users can customize their viewing experience, from side-by-side viewing to picture-in-picture viewing along with several other options,” the company’s press materials said
Besides the running Twitter or Discord in the second window, it seems to me the obvious application is to have your game as the main picture, with a YouTube walkthrough or a stream as the smaller one
While picture-in-picture isn’t new – some high-end TVs had it in the mid-1980s – what’s really interesting about the Samsung offering iss that it allows for a second audio output – meaning you can get sound for both images, not just the main one.
Thus, I can play Red Dead Redemption II on my Xbox One X with my Sennheiser GSP 370 [link] bluetooth headset for audio and my wife can watch whatever she likes in Netflix with the main sound – meaning we get to share the large 8K TV (with the accompanying awesome picture quality) as well as a physical space (the couch) too.
It’s an extremely promising development and one I’m looking forward to seeing in action as the TVs start coming onto the market – I was really impressed by the demo I saw at CES.
Royce Wilson is attending CES as a guest of Dell
