TV makers want to you watch TikTok videos on vertical TVs

China’s TCL, Skyworth and Hisense join Samsung at CES with their own TVs that rotate to portrait mode

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The Sero is aimed at millennials who are used to enjoying content on mobile, according to Samsung. (Picture: Samsung)

Xinmei Shen

Published: 5:00am, 11 Jan 2020Updated: 6:55pm, 16 Feb 2020

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

People love short videos on their smartphones. So it’s only natural that they’d love those same videos on TV… right? That’s the idea behind a new (well, kinda) consumer product segment at CES this year: TVs that rotate to give people a vertical screen.

Major Chinese TV makers Hisense, Skyworth and TCL all showed off vertical TVs at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. They allow users to connect their smartphones to the TV and watch all their favorite portrait-mode videos from apps like TikTok and Instagram Stories on a much larger screen. And when you’re ready to watch normal television again, just rotate the screen back to horizontal orientation.

While this might seem like a concept made for China, the home of TikTok-maker ByteDance, it actually originated from South Korea. Samsung was the first to introduce the idea in April last year.

Samsung’s Sero, a 43-inch 4K QLED TV that rotates vertically, was launched in May 2019 in South Korea, where it costs 1,890,000 won (US$1,629). It’s reportedly also getting a release in the US and some other countries later this year.

We asked Hisense, Skyworth and TCL about their rotating TV launch plans, but they didn’t respond.