Streaming Internet Video on LG Smart TV

One of the most common inconveniences faced by owners of LG TVs is the inability to view videos from sites through the built-in browser. In most cases, the video just "crashes" in 30-40 minutes. And although many believe that this is done on purpose, in order to direct the attention of users to the paid content of LG Smart World applications, the cause of this problem is quite banal and there is no conspiracy here. In reality, the video crashes due to a simple lack of resources: “heavy”, non-optimized web pages + flash player consume the TV's memory too quickly, which sooner or later leads to crash. In the application, the same video will be played quite calmly, because It is sharpened and optimized for such tasks.

In the fall, we added to SS IPTV the ability to work with video files posted on the Internet. Those. in fact, we made a universal video player for Smart TV, in which the user could play any Internet video by giving him a direct link to the file.

The problem is that the vast majority of people have no idea how to get a direct link from the video page. As a result, the first two weeks of using this very useful and promising (in our opinion) function showed depressing statistics: only a few dozen people used the video player.
It became obvious that it was necessary to radically simplify the work with videos inside the application. The priority task is to create a tool that will allow you to launch video on Smart TV directly from a computer browser in one click. A similar solution was already implemented for LG Smart TV last summer: the Vtelek application was recognized as the winner of the LG Smart TV Apps Contest 2012. This is a worthy, extremely simple and convenient application, which, in our opinion, still has several disadvantages:

1. The inability to create playlists - a sequence of playable records
2. The inability to work with multiple devices
3. Lack of "feedback" with the application. The browser part does not “know” anything about the application.

Summarizing all this, we came to the unequivocal conclusion that the means of the bookmarklet are not enough for our purpose. As the optimal tool for solving this problem, we chose a browser extension. A small study showed that the vast majority of our users prefer the Google Chrome browser, so we decided to start with the release of the extension for it.
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SS IPTV Cloud Bridge has gone through several modifications already, but today he can do the following:

• Run / add to playlist video from sites VKontakte , YouTube , RuTube . Additionally, for a friend, a fan of the show “Voice”, they added the ability to work with videos from the First Channel website, for the Spaniards added support for their popular video hosting sites allmyvideos, streamcloud etc
• Add, delete, edit elements of already loaded video playlist
• Connect several devices to work at once - it is very convenient to add videos to relatives living somewhere far away
• Generate an archive that on 2012 TVs can be used to autoload the application.

And yes, he also has a multilingual interface. The extension interacts with the application both through the server (forming a playlist) and directly (when the user wants to simply launch the video, without adding to the playlist), and if your computer is on the same network as the browser, the plug-in will not be at all embarrassed if the application suddenly not running - he will launch it himself.

Bottom line: for six weeks from the online store Chrome was installed 1,660 copies of the extension. More than a thousand people use it every day.
The most obvious drawback of the solution used is the lack of cross-browser compatibility: in fact, for each of the browsers, you need to write a new plug-in, delve into the nuances of development and distribution, but, I think, the effect is still justified.