Smart TV Alliance to promote app development

LG and Philips have united to create the Smart TV Alliance, a group that aims to create a set of open HTML-based standards that will enable app developers to create apps that work across connected TV brands.

The Smart TV Alliance said its mission is to create a large and productive ecosystem for Smart TV application development that gives manufacturers a faster path to more and better TV applications, enables developers to write applications once for many different platforms and provides consumers with a rich source of content and services.

Founding members LG and TP Vision, a company that manufactures TVs under the Philips brand, said SDK 2.0 software would be released on the Alliance’s website for developers to use to create apps for members’ 2013 TV sets. The Alliance will be open to any relevant organisations.

“Before today, the Smart TV industry was a very difficult market for both TV manufacturers and application developers as TV’s from different brands used different platforms and technologies,” said Bong-seok Kwon of LG Electronics and president of the Smart TV Alliance. “The Smart TV Alliance creates a larger playing field which encourages developers to create more and better TV applications at the same time giving manufacturers and consumers the richest source of movies-on-demand, music services, games, social networking and more.”