The BBC is to share its TV Application Layer (TAL) with the connected TV sector at large through the open source repository GitHub.
Its planned to share the live, latest code as used in the BBC’s connected TV applications, such as those produced for the London Olympics.
In a blog post technical product manager Peter Lasko said the use of Open Source would allow other parties to contribute suggestions to the code that would ultimately allow the applications to reach greater audiences by working on more devices.
“The BBC is keen to encourage the connected TV market. As the BBC licence fee has funded this work, we can create more value for money by sharing this work with others in the industry, for the benefit of our audiences,” wrote Lasko.
TAL was developed in response to the hundreds of different devices on the market that use a variety of methods to ultimately create the same result.
TAL abstracts the differences between devices and creates a number of TV-specific graphical building blocks (like carousels, data grids and lists), to provide a platform upon which applications can be built.
The TV Application Layer also provides some TV-specific graphical widgets for use in new application development.