Return Entertainment Taps Aethir’s DePIN Infrastructure For Smart TV Gaming

The move comes as Samsung is ramping up its web3 smart TV rollout.

Web3 projects are increasingly looking to the burgeoning smart TV gaming sector to bolster growth.

On Aug. 21, Aethir, a decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) project providing GPU-as-a-service, teamed up with Return Entertainment, a cloud-native gaming company targeting the smart TV segment. Return Entertainment will leverage Aethir’s decentralized GPU cloud infrastructure to power its games per the deal.

An announcement said the partnership will facilitate streaming-based gaming experiences for smart TV operators and manufacturers, and streaming service providers.

“By offloading GPU-intensive workloads to the cloud with Aethir, Return Entertainment enables players to enjoy state-of-the-art games with only a basic, stable internet connection, making premium cloud gaming more accessible than ever,” the announcement said. “With nearly one billion smart TVs in use worldwide — only a fraction of which are connected to gaming consoles — this integration unlocks a massive untapped new audience for the gaming industry.”

The move comes after Return Entertainment’s smart TV cloud gaming platform debuted its maiden game, Rivals Arena, on Samsung TVs across the United States. Users can play the game by scanning a QR code, with their smartphone as a controller.

Aethir claims to boast the largest fleet of Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs in the web3 industry. In November 2023, Aethir launched a testnet for cloud gaming on Arbitrum, Ethereum’s largest Layer 2 network.

Web3 gaming on smart TVs

The news comes roughly two weeks after Samsung deepened its partnership with Illuvium, a popular web3 game, as part of the consumer electronics giant’s bid to promote its web3 TV bundles.

The partnership allows Samsung Web3 TV owners to view their in-game Illuvium NFTs on their television devices. Illuvium also features at Samsung’s booth during the ongoing Gamescom convention in Sydney, Australia.

Samsung launched its web3 TV bundle, GEN3GATE, in April 2024. The product can be purchased as a package alongside two of Samsung’s smart TV models, bundling together a Ledger Nano X, one of Samsung’s GEN3RATOR NFTs, and a Samsung smart TV. GEN3RATOR NFTs will unlock access to new features as Samsung’s web3 roadmap rolls out.

In addition to Illuvium and Ledger, Samsung has also partnered with the World of Women NFT collection, the Wilder World metaverse game, and the Polygon Ethereum scaling solution as part of its web3 push.