(Almost) Everything You Wanted to Know About Tizen TV Apps but Were Afraid to Ask

If you’re looking at expanding your platform’s footprint into the OTT space, here’s what you need to know about Samsung’s Smart TV platform

Though we’re a fairly generalist design and technology firm, at HappyFunCorp we’ve done an unusual amount of work on apps for TVs and set-top boxes, including award-winning apps for Twitter and Disney. We wanted to take a closer look at one of the platforms we’ve worked with, Samsung’s Tizen OS, and what makes it interesting for businesses evaluating whether to build a TV app.

If you’re at a startup or established company taking a look at options to expand your reach in the smart TV and set-top box space, it’s a good idea to get familiar with Samsung’s offering, Tizen — particularly now that it’s becoming available to other OEMs.

Here’s a breakdown of why you might consider building a TV app at all and how Tizen fits into the picture.

Best experiences for TV apps

It makes sense for most tech-enabled startups to build progressive web apps or native mobile apps as their flagship experience, but TV apps are great for a number of cases.

Entertainment

The Twitter and Disney apps we built for TV were focused around streaming. In the case of Twitter, it was partly live content with a rich Twitter layer as well as on-demand video. With Disney, the focus was on aggregating purchased movies so they could all be accessible on all of your devices.

Letting people stream content that they would have a hard time getting otherwise, that has some personal value to them, or that you’ve enriched with some additional information are all great uses of the medium.

Gaming

Normally when we think of gaming on TVs we think of XBox, Playstation, or Nintendo, rather than Smart TVs or set-top boxes. Expect to see growth in casual gaming on the latter platforms in the future, though. Apple is making a push with Arcade to get more game developers to think about tvOS, and Google’s Stadia platform recently launched, so we may see ripple effects from that.

Fitness

Tech-enabled fitness has seen huge growth in recent years — Peloton’s IPO at an $8B valuation is just one prominent example. One reason to think this will continue is that forecasts for smartwatches are strong, and fitness is a big driver of this.

Content that lets people workout from home on their TVs is a great use case, and it’s made all the more interesting by connected workout equipment and wearables that can provide feedback in real-time and track progress across workouts.

Kids Content & Education

Connecting kids with great content –in the right amounts — and away from certain deleterious algorithms, is every parent’s goal when meting out screen time. With Gen Alpha (Millennial’s kids) underway, expect growth in this space.

Why Choose Tizen?

If a Smart TV or set-top box app makes sense, one of the next key choices is to decide which platform — or platforms — to build for. There is a strong case to be made for ubiquity across tvOS, Android, Tizen, and others, and in fact, this was the strategy taken by Twitter on their livingroom app rollout. It’s helpful to understand a bit more about Tizen as a platform when considering it as an option.

Developing for Tizen

Smart TV and set-top box app development are fairly niche, and in some cases very idiosyncratic — Roku has its own scripting language, BrightScript — though tvOS and iOS are very similar, as are Android and Android TV.

Tizen gives you a couple of options for developing TV apps, with one being the ability to build an experience using web technology, i.e. using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Alternately, you can build in .NET. We’re fans of keeping stacks similar, so where the web option can get the job done, we would recommend that as an option so that it’s easier for a team of web developers to maintain.

User Experience with Tizen

Simply put, Samsung leads the growing Smart TV market, so that’s a pretty good start if you’re looking to get in front of a lot of users. When you buy a new Samsung TV, odds are it’s got Tizen built into it, thus removing the friction of having to buy another device to get access to great apps (e.g. FireTV stick, Roku, or Apple TV).

From a high level, a lot of the same features appear across the major TV platforms — app stores, search by voice, simple controllers, and some degree of surfacing live or otherwise interesting content. Tizen also has a voice assistant/AI, Bixby, for which Samsung just announced some new developer tools making it easier to build experiences that integrate with your home and other devices.

Conclusion

For companies that fit the use case well, there are compelling reasons to build an app for Smart TVs and set-top boxes, and Samsung’s Tizen is an important platform in the space.

Stay tuned for more posts about designing and developing apps for TV generally and Tizen specifically.

Some helpful resources on Tizen for TV

• Lifewire’s overview of Tizen gives a breakdown of what it’s like to use the platform if you don’t have access to a Samsung TV.


• Samsung’s Tizen TV Developer portal has lots of code snippets, tools, and guides