LG Electronics and TP Vision, the company now responsible for Philips TVs, have today announced that they’ve officially established the Smart TV Alliance, providing ‘infrastructure for effective collaboration among Smart TV makers and app developers’.
Tantalisingly the press release also states that the Smart TV Alliance has been established ‘with other Japanese TV manufacturers in the process of joining’. These Japanese brands almost certainly include Sharp, which was part of the Smart TV collaboration announced back at the 2011 IFA show and which is name-checked – possibly by accident! – in the press release. We can only speculate at this stage as to which other brands might be involved.
The stated concept behind the Alliance is to enhance the Smart TV experience by creating a non-proprietary ecosystem for application developers to create platform-independent services. This clearly has the potential to speed up the development of new online TV apps, as app creators don’t have to develop as many variations for so many different online TV platforms.
Smart TV Alliance: making more stuff come out of your TV.
Inevitably, part of the Smart TV Alliance’s role involves defining technical specifications which will enable application developers to create their applications and run them on multiple TVs regardless of the platform. To help this happen, the Smart TV Alliance is letting developers download the first version of its software development kit (available on its website) for free.
The collaboration also, of course, potentially increases the muscle of Smart TV Alliance members when it comes to negotiating content deals in this increasingly competitive area of TV development.
We’ll keep an eye on the new Alliance and update you when any other big brand names formally attach themselves to it.
