August 31, 2010—San Jose, CA—Samsung hosted an application developer day for their connected television systems entitled "Free the TV Developer Day". The event started with Samantha Harris of Entertainment Tonight as the hostess for the event, to give the feeling that the programmers in attendance were part of a high profile entertainment event.
Eric Anderson, vice president of content development at Samsung opened the event by noting that consumer value and behaviors are changing since the introduction of connected TVs three years ago. The platforms are changing to provide consumers with choice and control across all the platforms. This year will be a year of great change, as Samsung introduces their TV apps store.
The store will provide analytics and support for developers creating applications that fulfill consumer needs, because most companies planning to create apps need some type of return on investment. The app store itself will address a range of devices with expectations of posting 200 apps by the end of the year. An important consideration is that these apps must be high quality, with a consumer focus and the ability to operate across multiple screens.
Next, Boo-Keun Yoon, president of the visual display business unit at Samsung Electronics spoke about the company's creation of new categories of displays. These include LED backlight, and smart TVs. There've been many changes since the TV ecosystem saw the invention of the DVR. Since that time, their display division is making over half of their televisions apps capable. To encourage and enable development of applications for televisions, they are releasing an SDK for development of applications on their systems. Television is going through a revolution, changing from a singular activity to a shared experience through the introduction of new capabilities to the basic platform.
Third in the parade of Samsung executives was Tim Baxter, president of Samsung Electronics America. As televisions have evolved from color through LED backlighting for LCD and knowledge of how to make 3-D platforms, they are redefining and enriching experiences by creating new markets. These new platforms have integrated the convergence of many functions on the television.
As a multifunction platform, the television changes the way people think about these devices and the areas for use of these devices. First, Samsung has been the number one TV manufacturers for the last five years and are shipping about 37% of all televisions made. 60% of these televisions shipped are connected television capable. Consumers are discovering applications on the televisions and over half are activating connection capabilities in these sets. TV applications have the capability of creating long-term immersive experiences.
Second, they have created an environment where the platforms are open, simple, versatile, and free. Third, to help developers create applications for televisions, they developed and released an SDK to encourage and assist in the development processes for applications. This is especially important since these apps must work across multiple TV platforms and screen sizes, in the Samsung line. And finally, Samsung understands the need for partners in this endeavor. They are building an ecosystem so that they can ship products with applications built in. They're going to get $70 million for marketing Samsung's apps over the next year.
They're hoping to create great experiences for consumers and will, through marketing efforts, help to push applications across all media. Future extensions to these platforms will include an integrated camera to enable gesture-based control. This is just the begining; the future will see more ways to entertain as apps transform basic appliances to sharing platforms. There are still a lot of changes and inventions to come.
The first outside executive was Robert Stevens, founder of Geek Squad and CTO of Best Buy. The introduction of apps, through Best Buy and others, must address four screen sizes. Apps provide a method to introduce people to new functions, and when they can migrate across screens people experience this improved functionality wherever they are. They are looking forward to new marketing inputs from the partner, Samsung, and hope to develop capabilities within their own sales force to become a source of information and intelligence about new functionality in multimedia systems.
The next partner presenter was Tim Westergren, founder and chief strategy officer of Pandora. He described the genesis of Pandora starting in 2000 trying to develop a music genome. Over time they've also had to develop API and user interfaces to exploit the manual analysis algorithms that define Internet radio. Since the launch in 2005 they have a seen number of changes in usage patterns. When they started, peak use was between nine and five local time, when people were at work. When the iPhone was released in ‘08, uses changed to full-time and the number of uses doubled to more than 100,000 activations per day. One function seeing increased use is the ability to skip songs while driving in a car.
In ‘08, at the CES the first Samsung app was introduced. Now this app is running on over 38 platforms. Pandora has changed the nature of listing to music from a broadcast function to a personalized playlist. This change was similar to that of a smart phone moving into the house. However, a big screen is very different from a smart phone so apps must be both elegant and simple to be successful. They scale apps across platforms through their API plus some customization. It is unlikely they will perform similar functions on videos because of the greater diversity of video content compared to music. Music works well in social media because it changes the experience from secret and private to shared.
The final guest speaker was Chuck Pagano, executive vice president of technology for ESPN, noted that his company's mission is to tell stories. When he started as a cable feed in Connecticut in 1978 they the way sports are covered. In ‘87, they put cameras on board the sailboats in the America's Cup race and changed the perspective and concept of sailboat racing.
They introduced the yellow first down line in NFL football games, and continue with ongoing technology changes such as the skycam in NFL stadiums. In 2003, when half the households in the US had HD, they started four HD channels. Next, as 3-D comes into play, they are starting dedicated 3-D channels for sports.
Technology in the media business tends to increase costs or making changes in the medium. Digitized media are not changing viewership and in fact, interactivity can influence ratings. The Sport Center app enables various information to be attached to games you are watching. They continue to develop new technologies in their R&D lab in Orlando Florida.
After the parade of executives, Olivier Manuel, director of content and business development at Samsung proposed a rationale for developing apps. There are three main ingredients for a good television which is not the same as a phone app. You need a good idea, an intuitive user interface, and an implementation process. One of the things they've learned from early apps is that TV technology is changing but human nature is not changing at nearly the same rate.
In general, TV has been viewed as a vehicle for relaxation and entertainment in a setting geared towards comfort and pleasure, called "lean back" mode. From Samsung, all of the BluRay products and all of the televisions 40 inches and larger support apps. For the TVs, there are two general modes to create new apps, as an overlay and as a full screen function. For example, a potential app may use a ticker or crawler in part of the screen with customized data inputs. Another possibility is to use a full-screen pop-up.
Video apps can use the full HD capabilities of the screens. One thing they've learned about user interfaces is that it's better to use the full screen than to use a small window, because a small window in the corner confuses people about what's in the existing show. For music apps, all functions have to be controlled through the remote control. For text entry, you have to map the numbers to letters and add some prediction capabilities to minimize the task of writing.
In general, it's best to have one button to activate an application. One interesting challenge will be to develop apps for alternate platforms also work on televisions since android phones and the galaxy tablet will have similar capabilities as the connected TVs. Game apps generally are better when they use the full screen because other moving content becomes very distracting.
Overall, it's important to understand the use modes and differences between the various platforms when creating applications for the various display platforms. The key to successful apps is versatility and simplicity.
Eva Bask, the content developer community support and tools person said to register and download the SDK to start working on new apps. They have test centers in San Jose, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, and New York to try out apps on the various platforms and have a process including guidelines on how to pass their quality assurance requirements.
Jason Han then went through a few examples and gave an overview of the SDK. First he described the history starting in ‘08 when they released SDK 1.0 as a text based tool with support for browser media player and not much else. In March of this year they released version 1.3 which included flash-lite 3.1 and the ability to also include JavaScript. Now they're releasing version 1.5 which includes a visual editor, increased documentation and tutorials.
The SDK architecture includes an application manager and an engine with three main functions. First is the basic graphics engine and second in API and third a native display function. These were designed for flexibility and ease-of-use as well as efficient code generation for apps. The latest version permits text and visual editor entry with browser support with HTML 4.1 JavaScript 1.64 number of platforms including Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.
The visual editor has been designed to be easy to use and be as flexible to possible. It is based on design-centric templates to encourage and enable reuse. File structure is based on a common API that can access CSS, images, and JavaScript. The device API is a declaration in index.html and all of these can access an emulator of the display environments and remote controls.
The video editors object-oriented programming with drag-and-drop features plus labels and location information as well as preview emulation debility the output from the video at her can be exported to the text editor for fine tuning controls included in the templates. That's using flash including games, video, and animation can use up to full HD resolution through an H.264 codec.
In addition to being used as a standalone development system, the SDK can also be used as a plug-in to browser with links to JavaScript and flash through configuration files. When used as a plug-in, you modify index.html to create object types and then use a script to combine flash and Java. This is especially useful if you're trying to reuse portions of existing apps.
Upon completion of your app design, you upload the file for testing where the function it becomes a package via the Apache server. This requires two separate IP addresses one for your computer and one for the TV on the same network. Upon entering the developer ID you can stream the app from the server to the TV. The system will interface to any wi-fi hardware. Further details are available from the documentation and online at the Samsung website - http://www.samsungdforum.com/