Smart TV App Starts

The "parlor battle" between IT vendors and color TV manufacturers was upgraded again. In early May, when Lenovo released its Smart TV Music TV, it said that it was necessary to offer a million dollars to recruit killer applications globally. Less than a month later, when Lenovo still had no movement, domestic color TV manufacturers once again took the lead. Recently, Hisense announced that it will hold a prize of 10 million yuan to organize a smart TV application contest. It will also jointly invest in angels and propose a plan of 100 million yuan of funds and 1 billion yuan of venture capital to encourage developers to develop applications on Hisense's smart TV platform.

After nearly two years of market development, the smart TV market has grown. In terms of hardware, single-core processors of about 1G have become more common, and dual-core processors with 1.5G have begun to appear. The CPU and chip performance of the products have been continuously enhanced. At the same time, the Android 4.0 operating system specifically targeting smart TVs has also been adopted by many vendors. Smart TV is gradually improving on the hardware. However, the relative software did not keep up. Without a unique and appealing application, what does smart TV have to do with consumers? This is a difficult problem for manufacturers.

At present, most of the smart TVs introduced by the manufacturers use the Android system, and some of them are based on the Android system for secondary development. In addition, there are some products that use the Linux system. At the Mobile World Congress at the beginning of the year, Andy Rubin, vice president of Google Engineering and creator of Android, announced that the number of applications on the Android platform has reached 450,000. However, how many of these applications are for TVs? The fact is that many of the applications in smart TVs are transplanted from smart phones or tablet computers. So far, mobile applications that have been ported to television have not yet seen commercial success. HD, large-screen, and multi-player televisions have not yet been used. This is the cornerstone of TV APP development.

Indeed, as the most important screen in the family, TVs have not been replaced since they occupied the “main position” in the living room. Smartphones and tablet PCs have made mobile Internet an important element of fashion life, but smart TVs have emerged. As the popularity is re-pulling consumers back to the TV, the upgrade of the "parlor battle" is bound to gather developers on this platform.

However, for the majority of developers, it is probably not easy to develop various applications for smart TVs. On the one hand, TVs have larger screens, higher resolutions, and sharing characteristics with many people. Therefore, these applications are certainly different from the applications on mobile terminals. This imposes higher requirements on the applications themselves, and it also makes R&D is more difficult and more investment is needed. On the other hand, it is not known how to achieve profitability for smart TV applications. There is no model of business model that can make developers stumbling.

Nevertheless, this step taken by color TV manufacturers is still very encouraging and encouraging. In the era of application as a king, simply selling hardware will inevitably lead to “marrying other people's clothes.” Since there is strength, why do companies not use their own hands? Although software and applications are the weaknesses for hardware manufacturers, although the development of smart TV APP has only just begun for developers, it is a blue ocean worthy of deep cultivating. Xintiandi, and this is the way that TV manufacturers must go.