Good day to all! Today we have an unusual double post: the announcement of a new contest of applications for smart TVs and an interview with the creator of one of the applications that reached the final of last year’s LG Smart TV Apps Contest 2012.



The application took the third place, but this does not detract from the merits of the author and the general level of development, and the application itself has a very interesting idea, but let's get everything in order;)

Competition

The main focus of the contest of applications for “smart” TVs LG Smart TV Apps Contest 2013-2014 this year will be to create interesting and popular applications for the new generation of LG TVs and strengthen cooperation with local developers. In addition to cash grants, the winners of the competition will be provided with marketing support to promote the application both on the platform and on other resources.
')
The competition will be held from October 11, 2013 to March 14, 2014. Applications developed, tested and launched on the LG Smart TV platform during this time period will be accepted. Anyone from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) can take part in the developer competition. For details on participation in the contest, see www.lgappscontest.ru , thank you for your attention and see you on the pages of our blog.

You can read about last year’s event, its announcement and winners here:
Description of the competition in Habré
Rewarding the finalists and post about it on Habré.

The idea of ​​SSIPTV

Any competitive work begins with an interesting idea: boring and everyday solutions are of no interest to anyone, although they are useful. Here there is both an idea and implementation - a tricky game with meanings and a great approach to the current application of Smart TV technology. What should TV do? Correct, show TV shows (first of all). And what should a smart TV do? Show transmissions intelligently? :) Exactly! An application for Smart TV that allows you to watch TV broadcasts distributed via IPTV channels of well-known providers that provide this service. Some kind of personal TV on TV.

Simple Smart IPTV

The application allows you to watch IPTV channels provided to the user by his provider. The base of the application already contains almost 400 providers, and we have stopped counting the number of unique video content sources when their number has exceeded one million.



Main advantages:
1. Geolocation
The ability to provide content differentially, depending on the user's physical location.
2. OTT and IPTV
Reproduction of unicast streams, which are available regardless of the user's network, and multicast streams, due to which the problem of the load on the broadcast servers during peak hours is solved.
3. Dynamic content management.
The opportunity for the provider (copyright holder), which allows you to manage the broadcast content through the admin panel.

From developer to user

I managed to talk with one of the creators of this application, and he agreed to answer my questions, for which I am very grateful.

Essentially, an application is a means to play streaming video over the Internet. Its most common use case is to view open, unencrypted IPTV channels provided to a user by his provider on the basis of a data plan. The need for such an application has been long overdue and is associated primarily with the growing popularity of IP television in our country: technologically, smart TVs today can save users from rapidly becoming outdated and inconvenient STB set-top boxes. The only reason these consoles are still in demand is the lack of ready-made solutions for commercial use on the market of Smart TV applications. At the initial stage of development, we paid great attention to architectural issues, thanks to which today we have a well thought out foundation for increasing functionality. One of the main advantages of the application is its extensibility (the number of supported operators is virtually unlimited) and flexibility (within the application, each operator can get their own customized solution with the necessary set of functions for him personally).
^{Note: here and below, in italics - the words of the head of SS IPTV - Evgeny Konkov.}

• Where did you learn about the competition, how the idea of ​​the application was born, how high was the motivation to win, are you satisfied with the organization?
  

I found out about the competition quite by accident, I don’t remember exactly where it came from, just clicked on a banner. In fact, by the time of application, we already had a ready-made solution, which we already managed to send once to the application store for verification. But later for the competition it was completely redone in order to optimize the interface for TVs. The motivation to win was quite high (as, incidentally, I am sure of all participants in the competition), this can be judged at least by the fact that the client part corresponded twice from scratch to eliminate the shortcomings of previous versions. The last one and a half or two months of the competition, we worked virtually without a break.
If you close your eyes to small, inevitable in such matters, overlays and omissions, we can say that the competition was organized at a high enough level. I would like to thank for this the Moscow employee of LG LG Alla Chudzhaeva and Vera Tyuzhankina and, in particular, the staff of the Petersburg laboratory LG LG Alexander Cherepanova and Yuri Kirillov.

• When did you start development, were you already familiar with the platform, or did you become acquainted during the creation process? What could write an application?
  

I was not familiar with the platform, I mastered it in the course of development. In principle, there is nothing difficult in the development, careful reading of the documentation allows you to cope with this task very effectively
There was a choice between creating an application on the Web (HTML + CSS + JS), on Flash (AS 2.0) and AIR (AS 3.0).

• And what did you end up with? What was used as an IDE?
  

The first version of the application was created on a flash, because I already had programming experience under ActionScript, it seemed to me more convenient to begin my acquaintance with the platform from him. But later it turned out that Flash applications are much more resource intensive. Performance problems on TVs in 2011 (the application simply did not start on them) forced us to rewrite the application for the Web-platform of new TVs. Flash Develop was used as the development environment.

• Which of the hardware features had to be taken into account, does the zoo of devices affect and the limited hardware capabilities of the platform?
  

Significant differences between the 2012 and 2013 models. we did not find the only thing that on empirical TVs of 2013, incorrect behavior was detected with a flash player introduced by us. It had to be turned off, with the result that the ability to play normal rtmp streams was lost. While this function is not claimed, we do not think about solving this problem. Televisions in 2011 are distinguished by a significantly smaller number of dedicated hardware resources, which in some cases is a critical problem when playing Internet video. That is why we did not come out in Smart World on the 2011 models. At the moment, we have found a solution that works in most cases and are preparing to release the application for this line of TVs as well.

• How does the testing process. Tell us a little about the features of the emulator, the ability to debug the application directly on TV, I know how many problems this work can cause.
  

The LG SDK includes several emulators. We used TV emulators of 2011 and 2012. The 2011 emulator turned out to be completely useless, since does not reflect reality at all, using it is impossible to know how everything will work in reality. With the emulator of 2012, everything is different, in most cases, it works out the application as well as a real TV, although, of course, there are exceptions. That is why debugging the application is best done on a real TV. Fortunately, for LG TVs this process is as simple as possible and doesn’t cause any difficulties: it’s enough to prepare a special copy of the application on the LG Developer website, write it to the USB flash drive and insert it into the appropriate connector on the TV.

• How does the approval and display process of an application go to an app store from the point of view of the “user” of this system? Are there pitfalls, how many times have you returned the application for revision?
  

Application verification is an extremely difficult procedure to complete. It consists of several parts: checking the supporting documentation (Pretest), checking the functionality (Function Testing) and checking the content (Content Testing). SS IPTV was sent for revision three or four times, for a total of three months it took us. In most cases, we were “wrapped up” on Function Testing, but once they refused even to Pretest (due to the use of transparency in the application icon, although the documentation never states that it is forbidden). The most difficult thing in this matter is that you can never know in advance what the testers will consider to be an error, often you can and should argue with them, but this significantly delays the process of getting the application to the store and spoils the nerves.



Actually, this is all. I thank Evgeny Konkov for the time given to me, once again I congratulate you on your victory and give him an invite for a habr. You can find him under the ssiptv nickname, just don’t drown a person in questions, he still needs to work. ;)

Thank you for your attention, participate in the contest, create, win, and see you on the pages of our blog.