In the ever crowded music streaming space, these services must find ways to cement their respective differentiation cases to consumers–if they’re to gain meaningful traction that’ll lead to monetization.
One often-overlooked company in this sector, Samsung Milk Music, thinks tapping into sports will make its product stand out.
Since the start of this college football season, Samsung Milk Music has debuted a Sports genre that lets sports fans listen to live streams of their favorite NCAA program. This service will broadcast 900 college football games and conference championships from 122 universities over the course of the 2015-16 season. Sports stations are directly livestreaming their audio feed within Samsung Milk Music’s app, which is more collegiate sports audio content than any other music streaming service.
This platform now offers both home game and away game audio feeds, giving users access to the broadcast of their choice. In the near future, Samsung Milk Music will also include sports talk content from CBS Radio’s national sports talk shows, which will be housed inside the Sports dial as well.
In order for these offerings to be technologically possible, Samsung enlisted Colorado-based SportsLabs for their infrastructure support. They have worked on building the digital media assets for the Atlantic Coast Conference and the College Football Playoff, to name a couple sports clients, in the past. The live streams will show up on the dial once the pre-game show begins and up until the post-game show concludes, with real-time score updates appearing on the screen as well. The service’s tab called the Sports Guide, located in the main menu, updates each day with the corresponding day’s games available and final scores.
Considering that Variety reported issues surrounding Samsung Milk Music a few months ago, it’s not surprising that they’ve decided to roll out this sports venture.
When Samsung Milk Music launched in March of last year, the service aimed to directly compete against Spotify. Up until that point, Samsung made a concerted effort to produce additional revenues via media sales, battling the likes of Apple and Google in the process. However, Samsung’s media apps never really got the scale from consumers the way external, existing services have.
Samsung Milk Music presented the company’s first stab around a service-focused angle. While they elected on this free, ad-supported medium, it hasn’t been strongly positioned as a stand-alone service. Rather, this product serves to boost sales of its hardware, even if this property wouldn’t necessarily become a viable revenue machine on its own. This app is akin to Pandora insofar as a personalized radio streams. Samsung Milk Music is available through Samsung headsets, online, and the company’s smart TVs.
“We are constantly looking for new ways to provide our customers with access to a variety of sports content, in a way that fits their lifestyle,” a Samsung spokesperson tells SportTechie.
“Understanding how how passionate college sports fans are, adding sports content was a natural extension to the service beyond music, helping fans stay connected to their favorite team,” continued the Samsung spokesperson.
Over 3,000 NCAA basketball games from 137 universities will be livestreamed on Samsung Milk Music once the season commences later this fall, too. Roughly over 10 million smartphones units have been sold by Samsung this year thus far, with a goal to reach 70 million, per Forbes. For college sports fans that also happen to be Samsung users, there’s another avenue in which to consume audio broadcasts of their alma mater while on-the-go this season.