Neon lights surround the message of the new Samsung Galaxy S4 at Hong Kong harbour
With the hype surrounding last night’s unveiling of the Samsung flagship S4, the UNPACKED event at New York’s Radio City Music Hall had been long-anticipated for us here at 7digital. Not least for the sensational ergonomics that J. K Shin, the president and head of IT & mobile communications division, flaunted on stage – with new features including a touchless ‘Smart Scroll / Pause’ feature, the ‘S Translator’, ‘S Health’ and 13-megapixel, 360-degree camera - but mainly for the fact that this new device in the Galaxy range has our technology powering the Samsung Music Hub app.
This will be the third time that we have been selected to fuel Samsung’s audio library for their mobile devices’ built-in music application, an opportunity we have led with pride, having seen the predecessors to the S4 go on to win ‘Phone Of The Year’ two years running. It is a partnering that we have built on the strength of a sturdy relationship with the electronics giant, since our initial collaboration in 2011 with the launch of the their S2 handset.
This meeting of the minds is further solidified by the hugely encouraging ten-fold growth in music streaming services from the 7digital API over the last twelve months. Our CEO Ben Drury comments that “High growth of the mobile sector led us to expand our open music platform and technology, and we’re now powering a diverse range of mobile digital music services – including radio and on-demand subscription streaming. We’re witnessing huge growth across the international markets we’re operating in, in both streaming and downloading of legal music.”
J. K. Shin holds the new device at Radio City Music Hall
Central to our core offering is delivering high-quality audio and streaming services at all times. The quality of this streaming has been improved with the use of Dolby Pulse technology, facilitating a reduction in the consumer and carrier bandwidth usage and resulting in a much faster music access on all data plans. This together with our continued working relationship with Samsung in 2013, allows us to provide users of the Music Hub with a fully integrated download and streaming infrastructure, unlike any other. Too, it brings us to forecast our figures in music streaming by the end of the year as surpassing the hundreds of millions mark, an impressive figure for us as we continue to carve a reputation as a hybrid business and consumer brand.
The S4’s Music Hub allows users to browse, preview and purchase music from our vast catalogue of music with all purchased music stored in the virtual ‘cloud’, which is fully accessible and synced with multiple devices, locally stored for offline listening, and gives users the ability to stream our full catalogue and access radio station direct to their smartphone. You can stream a play-back of the UNPACKED event in full and check out the Samsung Galaxy S4 in action right here.
Read the full ’7digital to be pre-installed on 100 million smartphones shipping in 2013 – including Galaxy S4‘ press release over on the corporate website here.
