- Fender’s Play platform is coming to Samsung TVs everywhere
- Arriving in the first half of 2026
- Pricing tbc
Fender doesn’t just make great 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 yet, but Samsung says it will 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 is not just a port of the Fender Play app. Samsung says a built-in “jam mode” will deliver Samsung-enhanced video and Dolby Atmos sound.
The twang is the tangent on your Samsung TV
I’m a performing musician and I really rate the Fender Play: If you’re new to an acoustic, electric or bass guitar or a ukulele, it does a really good job of teaching you the basics. Our music friends at Musicradar agree, giving the service four and a half stars out of five.
The big advantage of having Fender Play on your TV is that it gives you a much bigger screen, so it’s 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 faster.
I think this is important because many potential players give up when they find it frustrating to learn. According to Fender’s own figures, around 90% of guitar beginners give up within the first year.
That’s one of the reasons Fender made the Play; the more people stick with guitar (and bass and ukulele), 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 percent of salmon that come through the dam has a lifetime value of $10,000 [each]. They buy five to seven guitars, they buy more amps, they run the hardware side of the business. We felt that if we could reduce the number of outages by just 10%, we could double the size [guitar] industry.”
Fender Play is a subscription service and currently costs $19.99 / £19.49 (approx AU$39) per month, although Fender often runs promotions and paying annually can save you a lot. We don’t yet know if 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 company is 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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