IFA 2012 – BERLIN. Four companies are joining the Smart TV Alliance, Qualcomm, MStar, Obigo and YuMe.
The alliance was launched in June this year by founding board members LG Electronics and TP Vision (Philips) with Toshiba joining shortly after.
Qualcomm and MStar will bring their expertise and understanding in hardware design to the consortium while Obigo, a web browser provider and application developer, will provide input from a developer’s perspective. YuMe, a provider of video advertising software and services, will deliver knowledge and experience from the advertising community.
“The expanding membership of the Smart TV Alliance is clear indication that these companies recognize the value of this Alliance,” said Richard Choi of LG Electronics, president of Smart TV Alliance, in a statement.
“This is an industry coming together to solve a common problem, which has clear benefits for the consumer. The diversity of the Smart TV Alliance is reassuring because it shows that this is an industry movement, not just an initiative from TV manufacturers.”
“This is an important step for the industry. Being able to work with a much larger install base presents great opportunities for us,” stated David Hwang, president of Obigo. “Now we can put our energy into making our apps better instead of testing the same app on many different TV sets. We can be a lot more productive this way.”
As different communities in the Smart TV industry come together, the Smart TV Alliance will announce the SDK 2.0 specifications on its website, which will be supported by 2013 products from member companies. By looking at these specifications, developers will be able to understand what capabilities to expect on 2013 products and plan their application development accordingly.
After the specifications are announced, the SDK software tool will be available for download from www.smarttv-alliance.org.
