Tizen OS will power Samsung smart TVs in 2015

Samsung’s Tizen operating system will power all the company’s smart TVs in 2015, the Korean electronics maker announced Wednesday, another step in Samsung’s efforts to gain a foothold for the troubled OS.

“The way society consumes entertainment…has evolved and now includes multiple devices and endless content from a variety of sources,” the company said in a release about the new TVs. “Recognizing this shift, Samsung’s new platform was designed to deliver an integrated entertainment experience that is at once streamlined and powerful.”

Toward that end, the company said, the Tizen smart TVs will be able to automatically search for nearby Samsung mobile devices and connect to them, allowing content to be easily shared back and forth. “Users can also watch live broadcasts or TV on their mobile devices, anywhere on their home network, even when their TV is powered off,” Samsung said.

Samsung ultimately wants Tizen to be the “OS of everything,” as the company said during its developers conference last year, but the rollout of the operating system has been anything but smooth. It was originally touted by the company — one of the world’s top makers of smartphones — as a rival to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS mobile platforms. But nearly two years after its splashy launch at the high-profile Mobile World Congress trade show.