- Fender’s Play platform is coming to Samsung TVs everywhere
- Arriving in the first half of 2026
- Pricing tbc
Fender doesn’t just make fantastic guitars. It also has the Fender Play platform, a great video-based learning system that can teach you guitar, bass or ukulele. It’s been available on computers, smartphones and tablets for some time now – it launched in 2017 – but it’s never been available as a TV app, until now.
Fender has teamed up with Samsung in an “exclusive global partnership” to bring Fender Play to Samsung TVs in 2026. There’s no launch date as yet but Samsung says it’ll arrive in the first half of this year. And it should be available pretty much everywhere: Samsung says it’s coming to 49 countries across the Americas, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea.
The app isn’t just a port of the Fender Play app. Samsung says that a built-in “jam mode” will deliver Samsung-enhanced video and Dolby Atmos audio.
The twang’s the thang on your Samsung TV
I’m a gigging musician and I really rate Fender Play: if you’re a beginner with an acoustic, electric or bass guitar, or a ukulele, it does a really good job of teaching you the basics. Our music pals at Musicradar agree, giving the service four and a half stars out of five.
The big benefit of having Fender Play on your TV is that it gives you a much bigger display, so it’ll be much easier to see what’s going on. And it’s much more structured than trying to find lessons on YouTube, so it can help you progress more quickly.
I think that’s important, because many would-be players give up when they find learning frustrating. According to Fender’s own figures, some 90% of guitar newbies give up within the first year.
That’s one of the reasons Fender made Play; the more people stick with guitar (and bass and ukulele) playing, the more likely they are to be like me and buy lots of Fender guitars. As Fender’s CEO told Musicradar a few years ago, “we did the math. The 10 per cent of the salmon that make it through the dam have a lifetime value of $10,000 [each]. They buy five to seven guitars, they buy multiple amps, they drive the hardware side of the business. We felt if we could reduce the abandonment rate by just 10% we could double the size of the [guitar] industry.”
Fender Play is a subscription service and currently costs $19.99 / £19.49 (about AU$39) per month, although Fender often runs promotional offers and paying annually can save you a lot. We don’t yet know whether Samsung customers will be offered a discount when the platform comes to their TVs.
If you’re into making or listening to music, Fender is one to watch in 2026: the firm’s aggressively expanding into new sectors such as Bluetooth speakers and headphones, and we’re very impressed with what we’ve heard so far.
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