Android TV App Development — An Introduction | Perfomatix | Full Stack Engineering Company
Different parts of the world are under lockdown and people are confined to their homes spending most of their time on digital media. Entertainment, News, Gaming, apps and websites have an influx of increased traffic. Nowadays it is not that difficult for us to choose which digital media is the best for each needs. The emergence of the Internet and Technology plays a significant role in making the lives easier on accessing digital media in various forms. Even though the younger generation and the affluent are adopting Smartphones, Tablets, and other variants of portable devices for gaming and social media access, a large community is still enthusiastically increasing their internet usage for watching digital video content.
When it comes to video content we need to consider the role of TVs also — the primary gateway for the people inside the home other than Computers, Laptops, and Smartphones. The interesting fact is that the time spent with traditional TVs are still growing when compared to the time spent on all the other digital media. For example, studies have shown that adults in India will spend an average of 3 hours, 45 minutes per day with traditional media in 2020, or 69.5% of their daily media time. Digital platforms will account for the remaining 30.5%, or 1 hour, 39 minutes.
The studies say that traditional media, mainly TV, will grow at a faster rate and will still be the dominant platform for the predictable future.
Smart TV as a Digital Media
Today as we all know Smart TVs are taking over the Television market. Smart TV is a traditional television set with internet and web functions integrated which helps the user to stream media content and browse the internet. On top of the traditional functions, Smart TVs are also used as Internet TV, to watch over-the-top content (OTT) as well as on-demand streaming media. Now, these devices are capable enough to access social media functions, some of the TVs have come with Facebook and Twitter as a default option. Netflix like subscription services have also been made available through the Smart TV. For gamers, the gaming functionalities available in the Smart TVs provide an amazing visual experience than smartphones. Apart from the remote control, Smart TVs are providing the latest functionalities like Voice assistance control, Smart interaction, Gesture control making it more convenient to choose them over phones.
Smart TV Operating Systems
Smart TVs are equipped with popular operating systems that vary based on the vendor who makes the TV hardware. LG, Samsung, Sony, Panasonic, and Apple are the top players/brands in the list of vendors. Some of the popular OS platforms as listed below.
Android is leading the list because of the popularity gained by the platform in the industry with almost 40% market share.
Android TV
Google unveiled this platform back in 2014 and it expanded its Android operating system from smartphones to smart TVs. Android TV had conquered a major share in the global market in the previous years and some global industry researches say that the global Android TV market is anticipated to rise at a considerable rate in the next 4–5 years. In developing countries, the demand for high-resolution TV is higher which is a key factor for the market growth. Also, the availability of high-speed internet and the influence of new online content enables the users to use Android TV more than any other medium. This combination delivers high-quality video content which very much attracts users to use Android TV.
Android TV Apps
Since Android TV became a dominant player in the market the number of TV apps are also increasing based on the demand out there. Android TV now has tens of millions of users and 140+ pay TV operator partners worldwide. Some of the top TV applications available in the Play Store are listed below
Over-the-top apps (OTT) termed as the future of video content, are one of the favorites of Android TV users. The specialty of these types of applications is they allow the user to stream video content from the provider on the preferred devices any time they want. These apps are working based on subscription services.
As you can see most of the apps are already available for smartphones. So the same apps are extended to use in TVs but provide a different visualization aspect to fulfill the TV requirements. Demand for the apps suited for Android TV is set to increase with the growing popularity of Android TV.
The Android team in Google has provided enough support for the developer community out there in the world to build apps for Android TV. The TV app development shares the same structure as those for phones and tablets. This means the developers can create new TV apps based on what they already know about building apps for Android phones or extend existing apps to also run on TV devices. However, the UI/UX for TV is substantially different from phone and tablet devices. In order to make our app successful on TV devices, we must design new layouts that can be easily understood from 10 feet away.
We’ll be discussing more about App Development for Android TV in the coming days.
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Originally published at https://www.perfomatix.com on May 15, 2020.
