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

Two Free Seasons And A Film Marathon

The evidence so far comes mainly from Prime Video. For two weeks in August 2024, ahead of the second season of The Rings of Power, the entire first season ran free on Samsung TV Plus in the United States, Canada, Brazil, the U.K. and Germany. Samsung says it was the first time Prime Video had made a complete season of one of its original series available through an external streaming service.

The play was repeated for Fallout, whose first season ran free across seven markets from December 3 to 25, 2025, through the December 17 season two premiere. The campaign extended into a Fallout 76 experience on Samsung Gaming Hub.

Samsung and Lionsgate have also applied the format to a theatrical campaign. A dedicated Hunger Games pop-up channel ran in the U.S. from March 30 to April 14 this year, ahead of the November theatrical release of The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. Samsung says viewers can expect more stunts like these around major titles later this year.

Nakano frames the logic in the arithmetic of his cable career, where a 1% Nielsen rating could make a channel culturally visible. “Everyone was chasing one percent of viewership, but how do you deliver to the ninety-nine percent that have never seen it?” A second season sharpens the problem. Viewers who missed season one rarely arrive cold.

An Ad Buy, Not A License

Nakano says Samsung originated the proposal and approached Amazon about expanding the pool of potential season two viewers across multiple markets. The campaign was anchored in an existing advertising relationship rather than structured primarily as a conventional content license. “They were committing to buying ads. That was always part of the ecosystem,” Nakano says. “It was really, what can we do to help amplify that experience and that spend?”

The free season sat on top of a committed media buy: amplification, not transaction. Samsung says the wider campaign generated billions of marketing impressions, although it has not disclosed how it calculated that figure.

Nakano says both companies were uncertain whether free distribution would feed the subscription service or cannibalize it. “We didn’t know if this was going to be cannibalistic,” he says. “They didn’t know that either, but they had the wherewithal to say, let’s give this a try.” Asked whether cannibalization was formally assessed: “They were big enough to say, who cares? Let’s try this.”

What Samsung Can Prove

Samsung can demonstrate exposure. The harder task is proving what that exposure caused.

A campaign of this kind produces four levels of evidence. The program was available. A viewer encountered it and watched for a defined period. The viewer then subscribed, streamed the next season or bought a ticket.

Samsung’s data is formidable on the first three. “The only metric that really matters for me is whether they are watching and consuming,” Nakano says, and The Rings of Power became the service’s highest-viewed on-demand title in every region where the campaign ran, according to Samsung. For Samsung’s advertising business, that may be enough. For a studio trying to sell a subscription or a movie ticket, it is not.

What Samsung routinely reports back to partners is engagement: hours viewed, from its own data. On the fourth level, Samsung’s strongest claim is geographic. Samsung says Prime Video recorded stronger new-subscriber growth in markets that carried The Rings of Power campaign than in markets that did not.

Samsung has not disclosed the figures or enough methodological detail to isolate the campaign’s effect, and Amazon has not publicly confirmed the result.

The comparison points toward an incrementality test, but it does not yet provide one that outsiders can evaluate. Beyond that, the evidence is inference. “By way of Amazon coming back to do more, the proof was in the pudding.” Repeat business is meaningful, but it is not the same as independently verifiable conversion data.

Auto-Play And The Nielsen Gap

The scale claims invite their own scrutiny. In some markets, TV Plus begins playing automatically when a Samsung set is switched on, and the service does not appear in Nielsen’s The Gauge. Nakano defends both on the same ground: television has always worked this way.

“The channel you were watching automatically played. This was a user behavior expected for the last hundred years of television,” he says. “We’re not training a user to do something new.”

He argues that Samsung’s first-party data is more exact than panel-based measurement. “I know exactly which devices are watching, how long they’re watching. I have perfect data.” First-party visibility is not a third-party currency, and how far advertisers and studios accept Samsung’s measurements will help determine how far the model travels.

From Stunt To Release Window

Nakano sees Fox’s Roku acquisition as validation of the strategic value of controlling the television interface. “It anchors and proves the importance of that relationship, of that device and that UI,” he says.

Netflix is adding programming to create more advertising inventory inside its own service. Samsung is using its distribution to aggregate audiences for programming owned by others. Both strategies reflect the increasing value of the television interface between content and viewer.

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Whether sampling becomes a formal stage of the release sequence will depend on evidence that free exposure creates incremental demand rather than simply shifting where existing fans watch.

FAST began by extracting more value from programs that had already been released. Samsung’s experiment is whether free television can create value for the release that comes next.