In August 2010, Samsung announced a "Free the TV" apps contest, where it offered prizes between $1,000 and $200,000 each, plus a 3DTV, Blu-ray player and starter kit for each of the 14 winners in the contest. The goal of the contest was to attract independent developers for Samsung's HDTV-based App Store. Even though Samsung is one of the leading manufacturers of HDTVs and makes a lot of money in selling this high growth item, why did it choose to make this substantial investment in offering prizes to developers? 

Answer:

Samsung announced the contest to promote this idea of TV platform. Initially it used to be a simple offering where there was no feature of apps, and web-connected TVs and to sell this idea, Samsung called the developers and paid them through the contest. The idea is to get the best idea to be implemented in the we-connected TVs from the pool of ideas and giving away huge prizes to the developer who can make the best apps.

Step-by-step explanation

The idea is to dwell deeper into the market of TV's and bringing the new tech of web-connected apps and internet TV to gain the competitive advantage over the other players when they were scrambling for the development of apps. Though, the idea was hard to implement because it was difficult to turn the audience who generally watches movies, shows on TV to use the apps. Samsung saw the creativity and out of the box contents from the contest and received amazing responses from the developers in creating apps for their Smart TV and 3D and used this contest to develop the apps or at least get an idea of how to enable the apps ecosystem into multi-platform strategy in Samsung TVs and other devices.