Connected TV (or Smart TV) by Samsung represents a new way to approach the television platform, in which the fruition of classic television programs is combined with the ability to surf the Internet and use applications with varied capabilities, while supporting the platform television, with which users have full familiarity.
- to help and drive the user to choose Videos On Demand
- to permit access to most popular social networks (Facebook, Twitter)
- to buy and listen music, to play videogames
- to access to different information contents : meteo, daily news, You Tube, interactive Google Maps
Quartarete@Internet by CSP
- streaming: the Internet streamed channels of the broadcaster: Quartarete, Quartarete Blu and For Music
- video on demand: a selection of content already broadcasted and made available to the public upon request
At launch, the application will show a list of the two types of content currently available.
When the user choose a specific category, he will receive an always up-to-date list of available content (television channels or multimedia contents), provided by the broadcaster.
The selection of content type on the left and the associated content, on the right
When the user chooses one of the contents from the list, the application will show a screen containing the information associated with it and additional related information received from Twitter channel of the Piedmont region.
The screen showing the selected content with description and Twitter channel
The application gives the user the ability to select the videos he prefers and to bookmark them under the type “Favorites”. A bookmark can be revoked at will by the user, and in that case the content will be removed from “Favorites”.
Technical notes on the application development
The development framework is based on the JavaScript scripting language for the definition of application logic and the HTML and CSS for the aspects related to user interface. Each application for Samsung Connected TV is executed into the environment made available by the “invisible” Maple browser. In this way the launching of an application is similar to that of a classical desktop application.
For playing streaming and on-demand videos, the following tools were used:
- a custom Adobe Flash RTMP video player has been developed to view the streamed channels
- the standard video player has been adapted to reproduce videos from remote Quartarete archives
The application requires constant access to the Internet for remote playback of content and to obtain the updated list of contents. This list is implemented in an xml format file available for download from the server of Quartarete via an http request.
The develpment tools is the standard IDE made available for download from Samsung. During desktop installation, it installs the SDK, the Apache Server useful to upload the test application on the TV via network link and the emulator. Developers can refer to the online official documentation and forum (Samsung D Forum).
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