ITV has announced a partnership with Samsung that will see the ITV Player app for Android become exclusive to Samsung’s range of smartphones and tablets until August 31st.
ITV Player for Android has been around for a while, and has worked on a range of smartphones until now. It seems that ITV has become frustrated with the fragmentation of Android and its ever-growing number of manufacturers, models, software versions and screen sizes, and so it has decided to stick with Samsung only for a few months.
For users of other brand Android gadgets, the app won’t appear in the Play Store any more. We checked our account and the app is now listed as being incompatible on every non-Samsung device linked to our account, although strangely the app was found in the Play Store when using a Sony Xperia Z.
If you use a Samsung device then it’s all good however, with compatibility ranging from the Galaxy SII through to the Note II in terms of phones, and the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in terms of tablets. Streaming video will resize automatically to fit the size of your display. It seems the app will in theory work on any Samsung device running Android 2.2+, but on the Play Store only the following models have been tried and tested;
- Galaxy S2
- Galaxy S3
- Galaxy Note (original)
- Galaxy Note2
- Galaxy Note 10.1
- Ace2
- Galaxy Tab (P1000)
As with before, the app still brings about the ability to catch up on the last 30 days of programming from various ITV channels, through Wi-Fi or 3G. Samsung device owners will be able to download the app for free from the Play Store and Samsung Apps.
The move seems to be a strange one and will surely frustrate thousands of other Android users who don’t have a Samsung phone or tablet and want to catch up on missed ITV programming. We guess we’ll have to wait until August 31st, when the exclusivity period ends, to find out if ITV Player will return to other brand devices.