Creating a Smart TV App

This a relatively short post this week, as I’m sure some of you will be glad, we’ve been working on the garden and due to the amount of work it is taking to level it, I’ve not had as much time as I usually would to sit down and write.

Whilst I was studying towards my degree I was asked to investigate what it would take to set up a Radio Station. The College has just got a new principal and he was keen on the idea of setting one up having had great success at his previous college. I loved this idea and dived straight into figuring out what equipment was needed, what licenses were required and looking at possible ways we could run the station. Unfortunately, when I delivered my initial findings the idea had been shifted to the back burner due to the college merging with another education partnership.

Since then, all of that research has been kicking around my head and, like many of my other thoughts, has taken on a mind of its own. For example, what if it wasn’t just a radio station? What if it was a full-on media publishing business ran by the community, Web/Print, Radio, TV (both live and prerecorded) as well as the radio side of things (including podcasts)? 

I know there are companies like Global and Bauer who do this at a commercial level but what about at a community level? Around here I know of only one community radio station (Beverley FM) and I’m sure there’s some podcast kicking about (they seem to be everywhere) since Estuary TV closed its doors a few years back we no longer have a somewhat local TV station (they were based in Grimsby), we only have Your TV which seems to be a national TV network masquerading as a local TV station (similar to how Bauer and Global have taken over the local radio stations and now only run a few local bit of programming each day under a national brand (Hits Radio & Capital)). 

This of course got me thinking about how folks could tune into each of these theoretical community services. The first thing that popped into my head was a website that could feed an app for phones and tablets as well as integrations for smart speakers. That would easily cover the Radio and print side of things but what about the TV? 

I had some hope that Freely would be the answer, for those that aren’t aware of Freely it has been created by the group behind Freeview and Freesat, Everyone TV, and runs over the internet rather than through Satellite or Arieal. I initially thought that it would work on a similar standard to Freeview and Freesat which both work on variations of the DVB protocol. 

There is an IPTV version of the protocol called DVB-I. I have found various open-source projects based around DVB-I and found that I don’t have a clue about any of the programming languages used or where to start with their demo applications. Something for another time then.  

There also isn’t a lot of information about what protocols Freely uses as their current plan seems to be working directly with device manufacturers such as Vestel and Hisense on brand new TVs rather than releasing an app for existing TV and Smart TV Boxes such as the Apple TV or Google Chromecast etc.  

My next thought was about the apps that come preinstalled on most Smart TVs. How do they work? Well, it turns out they use a system called HbbTV or Hybrid Broadband Broadcast TV. After looking into this method I found that it’s basically a wrapper for smart TV to show websites or web pages as apps and uses web creation tools such as PHP, HTML, CSS and javascript. 

This I thought might be a simple solution. Create a website and somehow find a way of getting it on to my TV for testing. As I have a rebranded Vestel TV this was relatively simple. Add a .txt file to a USB stick with the web address inside and I can see the site and have basic interaction with the website.  

I’ve been searching for tools to make the app creation process simple, and I thought I had come across a solution in a PDF on the HbbTV website. The solution was called MPAT and it has its source code available on GitHub. The only problem is that when I tried to install the software on my webserver, I got errors everywhere and after playing whack a mole for a day and a half, I gave up with a plan to learn a boatload about compose and the other things involved to get it to work. I was really hoping everything would pan out with MPAT as it was based on a fork of WordPress called Bedrock. I had thought about possibly installing bedrock and somehow finding a way to install MPAT on top but again I’m not sure how I go about doing this. 

In the end, I used one of my holding sites (https://jabi.uk) and created a basic app that had a holding message and a live test card from the BBC’s R&D team. If you have a Vestel-manufactured TV and would like to give the app a go and see its development over time, there are instructions on the app website. If you don’t have a Vestel-manufactured TV that supports HbbTV then you should just be able to load it in your TV’s built-in web browser and give it a go. 

I’m going to continue playing with both the sites I’ve set and trying to see if I can somehow get the MPAT software to work because I think it’ll be a great starting point to help develop for these TV platforms, be it for this project if it ever comes to fruition or for another project in the future. As I tend to run these things in a docker container, I’ll park it on a repository once I have it running and can always redownload it if I need it. I’ll of course make it public should I ever get MPAT working. 

Do you think you could help me get MPAT working? Would you be interested in setting up a community media company? Let me know in the comments (either here or on your social platform of choice) I’d love to hear your thoughts.