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After decades of searching for the holy grail of “interactive TV,” the growing attraction of games on smart TVs appears to have cracked the code. From TV manufacturing giants like Samsung to nimble and innovative tech companies such as Play.Works, the last two years have demonstrated a powerful momentum of a new convergence of content developers, consumers, and advertisers.

Smart TV is TV – So maybe TV biz should be smarter

Being a TV set manufacturer means playing in the land of the giants. Samsung has a market cap of over $430 billion. Vizio was purchased by Walmart a year ago for roughly $2 billion, but it now sits inside of a company valued at over $900 billion. LG, with a market cap of a mere $11 billion, is a mere duckling in this crowd. There are smaller emerging players such as Roku and Telly, but their penetration in the U.S. is likely not much more than 1 million TV sets each.

Since the advent of streaming, it appeared that the fragmentation of Connected TV would inhibit any return of powerful gatekeepers like cable operators. But if you’ve got a smart TV, your initial content “portal” is provided by your TV set manufacturer – their screen is the first thing you see when you turn on the TV. According to Samsung’s Q1 2025 State of Video Report, 83% of the 122 million U.S. TV households have a smart TV. To paraphrase The Who: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

No doubt there is massive amount of TV content accessible directly through smart TV screens. And Connected TV advertising – encompassing smart TVs, and subscription as well as free streaming apps – has quickly become a more than $30 billion market, expected to grow by 50% over the next 3 years. But as Play.Works’ Boltax told me, a grander opportunity on smart TVs is “turning 30 second ads into 30-minute engagement.” And that’s where games are played.

Here come the games

Games on TV, as with games in the broader media business, have always sat a bit on the outside looking in, whatever their massive popularity. Gaming has been a siloed world of console games, with the “Triple AAA” titles such as Call of Duty, Halo, Grant Theft Auto and more; computer desktop games such as Minecraft and Fortnite; and more casual mobile games, ranging from Roblox to Candy Crush to Wordle (OK, maybe Wordle users can get a bit scary at times).

But the TV manufacturers – along with most everybody else in the Connected TV world – has latched onto the power of gaming in the last two years. Samsung TV launched its gaming hub back in 2022, but just this past August announced it was shifting its gaming focus to casual games. As Kevin Beatty, Samsung TV’s lead for gaming products told me, Samsung aims to provide “fun, free accessible games for more casual gamers, not just the hardcore players. [And] with Play.Works you can use your TV remote and jump into an entire catalog.”

LG announced the expansion of its own Gaming Portal at the same time, actually moving beyond its prior casual games to include access to Triple AAA titles now accessible directly from the cloud, with no console required. And the TV set manufacturers have been joined in the rush to gaming by Netflix, which, after an initial “scattershot” approach to gaming, is developing its own suite of games. And in just the last week, Comcast announced a deal to access for its customers to Amazon’s Luna gaming app directly through Comcast’s X1 Infinity and Xumo Streaming boxes. No console or retrofitted PC necessary.

Play.Works sits at the adults table for TV gaming

I go way back with Jonathan Boltax, the co-founder of Play.Works, as we were both toiling (mostly in obscurity) in the interactive TV sandbox in its early days at NBC. But Boltax credits the distribution of interactive TV content in conjunction with the 1996 Atlanta Olympics for fueling his broader vision for these capabilities, one that goes way beyond the decades-long longing to buy Jennifer Aniston’s sweater from Friends through your remote control.

Boltax and his partner Oz Avni founded Play.Works in Israel in 2016, giving it what Boltax calls a six-year head start on most developers of smart TV games. The company has created what it calls “the largest CTV games catalog in the world with over 400+ titles built from the ground up,” including major entertainment properties such as Pac-Man, Wheel of Fortune, and Tetris. Boltax is particularly proud of its soon-to-be-launched partnership with Freemantle Media for a Family Feud game for smart TVs. No word on the use of AI-generated Richard Dawson video.

According to Play.Works, its games have a combined reach of over 250 million homes and can be found on smart TVs such as Vizio, LG, and Samsung, as well as Comcast, Cox, SKY, and Roku. It is proud of its role as “Switzerland” in the platform battles, syndicating its game content as widely as possible through a process Boltax refers to as “write once, distribute everywhere.”

Although Play.Works has launched its first subscription service, Gametime, the heart of its business model is ad-supported. The holy grail for marketers is engaged audiences, and that is the core of what is driving the rush to games on TV and the attraction for working with Play.Works.

The overwhelming percentage of TV viewers are already “interacting” while watching, but it’s usually a distraction. Samsung reports that 91% of Americans watching TV will at some point look at their phones while watching. But when it’s a game on the screen, as Boltax notes, “they aren’t just watching; they are playing.” Boltax references his company’s research findings that “when people use Play.Works content they are spending an additional 11 minutes on the platform itself.” For marketers, more engagement means the ability not just to reach more eyeballs but to create stronger connections between the audience, the content, and the marketer.

Is Dispatch the future of blending games, TV and stories?

For Play.Works, playing games on TV isn’t the end game. The company sees the creator economy as an opportunity to drive yet greater engagement with audiences and take advantage of the full power of the TV screen and narrative storytelling.

Play.Works is now leveraging its distribution network for games to provide a platform for YouTube content creators to develop and more broadly distribute long-form programming, what Boltax almost tongue in cheek calls “TV on the TV.” Their partners are massively popular YouTube creators such as Salish Matter, Ninja Kids TV and EYstreem (please don’t ask me for my favorite shows). Why not engage audiences for 40 minutes at time for a program rather than 12 minutes for a game? For Boltax, the goal is “play, watch, repeat.”

The convergence of gaming and TV-type programming has also leaped to the forefront of consumer attention very recently. One of the buzzier games today, Dispatch, was released by AdHoc Studios in October and is a true hybrid between a TV show and game. The company describes Dispatch as a “superhero workplace comedy where choices matter.” In fact, it released the game on an episode-by-episode basis on PC and PlayStation platforms, and you can imagine applying the same approach for an interactive CTV platform. Michael Chuong, AdHoc’s CEO and the developer of Dispatch recently stated: “We’re really just borrowing a rhythm that’s worked for decades on television… that weekly cadence hits a sweet spot where anticipation builds, but not long enough to fade.” And it stars Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul to boot! Sounds like convergence to me.

Ultimately this isn’t just about audiences watching, it’s about players playing – and everyone engaging. No one knows how repeatable the Dispatch release process will be for AdHoc Studios, for Play.Works at some point or elsewhere in the gaming business, but why not bring this type of hybrid directly to TV? Do you want to grab young people on a smart TV set? This seems like a pretty smart idea.