Did Samsung Beat Apple to the Punch in this New Market?

As any follower of Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) will tell you, rumors of an upcoming interactive “iTV” product from Apple have been around for some time now. Apple CEO Tim Cook added to the rumor mill in a recent NBC interview when he said, “When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years. It’s an area of intense interest. I can’t say more than that.”

However, with Samsung’s new F8000 SmartTV with Smart Hub already making the rounds at various electronics trade shows this year, has Apple fallen behind in the interactive TV market?

According to Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson, the late Apple CEO told him, “I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use. It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”

Although no one knows exactly what Jobs “cracked,” Samsung’s SmartTV does seem to fulfill some of the criteria that Jobs discussed, such as being “integrated” and “seamlessly synced” to other devices. As reported by Forbes, Samsung has also introduced a curation product called TV Discovery at last month’s Mobile World Congress. This product “allows you to search all of your available streams for programming rather than having to navigate between each separate service as you have to now on most smart TVs.”