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What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile

dinkomarinac.dev

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Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile

#21

Post by dbbk »

joenot443 wrote: post #16

I'm sorry Dinko, but this ain't it. > On TV, input works very differently. Users navigate with a remote. Movement is discrete. Every interaction requires intention. Each action is one step in a sequence. That difference changes everything. I just don't want to read articles that are written by LLMs. If there was something you earnestly learned that you think other engineers could benefit from, use your own words to t…

Yes this is a waste of time. It’s actually a hard engineering problem! There are very few engineers who build for TV compared to desktop or mobile. The challenges are totally different. There are still some good human-written articles out there.

Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile

#22

Post by dbbk »

DanovonT wrote: post #5

I always found most tv apps have some performance issues. I've seen netflix, prime, even youtube crash, lag, or have some issues now and then that just made me think that maybe tvs are just not powerful. Don't even want to talk about Disney+, HBO, or Hulu. Then I got an appletv+ subscription, and was pleasantly surprised it performed far better, on an android tv even. I wonder if it's beyond just the company standard…

TVs are NOT powerful. It’s like writing software for the Lunar rover.

Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile

#23

Post by dinko7 »

joenot443 wrote: post #16

I'm sorry Dinko, but this ain't it. > On TV, input works very differently. Users navigate with a remote. Movement is discrete. Every interaction requires intention. Each action is one step in a sequence. That difference changes everything. I just don't want to read articles that are written by LLMs. If there was something you earnestly learned that you think other engineers could benefit from, use your own words to t…

I write all my articles by hand for the first draft and the final polish. I do use LLMs in between to try to get a clearer message (to what I find appropriate).

I understand if you don't want to read it, but there is nothing dishonest about this article. I've lived through what I wrote with those 3 apps. Take it as you wish and have a good day.

Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile

#24

Post by irishcoffee »

mrweasel wrote: post #17
dinko7 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember one time there was a random Philips TV that just kept crashing when the user tried to do "right" on the last item in a horizontal menu. The client kept testing on this TV, and we spent 3 weeks because my team lead at the time wouldn't trust me that I needed the TV to solve it. They finally agreed to send us the TV. Solved the issue in 10mins.

Who do I send my TV to to figure out why launching the DR app (Danish public broadcaster) on my Philips TV will power on the PlayStation and then crash? Normally I'd just use the AppleTV, but the kid stole the AppleTV to watch cartoons in the guest bedroom. I continuously surprised that a 10 year old AppleTV still a better option than using the apps that comes with the TV.

Did you try and look it up, or do any debugging? Does it crash with the HDMI unplugged from the Playstation? Playstation power unplugged?

Below is what 18 seconds of web searching led me to.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/8u6hrm/why_does_turnin...

Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile

#26

Post by ToucanLoucan »

embedding-shape wrote: post #4

I'd be curious why Amazon's Prime app has such horrible performance compared to literally every other streaming service, on WebOS at least (on a relatively recent LG OLED). They're all doing more or less the same thing, as far as I can tell as a user at least, yet just moving the focus around in Amazon's streaming app takes 0.5 second while it's instant in other apps. The bandwidth for actual streaming seems the same…

I'm still astonished how poorly optimized the YouTube app is/has always been on Apple TV. It's fucking wild how slow they can make it move about a bunch of rectangular icons, the same unit that can run honest to goodness videogames (if simple ones).

Though I suppose my XBox Series X can run Halo Infinite at 4K/60hz (with a ton of asterisks) and still chokes on the main menu which is also coincidentally a bunch of rectangles.

Maybe rectangles are just really hard to draw.

Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile

#27

Post by mrweasel »

irishcoffee wrote: post #24
mrweasel wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who do I send my TV to to figure out why launching the DR app (Danish public broadcaster) on my Philips TV will power on the PlayStation and then crash? Normally I'd just use the AppleTV, but the kid stole the AppleTV to watch cartoons in the guest bedroom. I continuously surprised that a 10 year old AppleTV still a better option than using the apps that comes with the TV.

Did you try and look it up, or do any debugging? Does it crash with the HDMI unplugged from the Playstation? Playstation power unplugged? Below is what 18 seconds of web searching led me to. https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/8u6hrm/why_does_turnin...

Honestly I haven't look into it much, I just thought it was funny that this one app would boot the PlayStation... and then crash. None of the other apps does this. To me it's just a funny interaction that should even be possible in my mind. In the end I hooked the AppleTV up again so I don't have care.

Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile

#28

Post by embedding-shape »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #26
embedding-shape wrote: post #4

I'd be curious why Amazon's Prime app has such horrible performance compared to literally every other streaming service, on WebOS at least (on a relatively recent LG OLED). They're all doing more or less the same thing, as far as I can tell as a user at least, yet just moving the focus around in Amazon's streaming app takes 0.5 second while it's instant in other apps. The bandwidth for actual streaming seems the same…

I'm still astonished how poorly optimized the YouTube app is/has always been on Apple TV. It's fucking wild how slow they can make it move about a bunch of rectangular icons, the same unit that can run honest to goodness videogames (if simple ones). Though I suppose my XBox Series X can run Halo Infinite at 4K/60hz (with a ton of asterisks) and still chokes on the main menu which is also coincidentally a bunch of rec…

Huh, that's strange, the YouTube TV app is for us one of the more performant ones, although the UX leaves a lot to be desired. But at least when you move right/down/left/up it does so within 50-100ms, whereas with Amazon's app it sometimes take almost a whole second for the focus on actually move around.

Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile

#29

Post by ramesh31 »

Does anyone have experience with professional Brightscript dev? I'm fascinated by it as a web developer looking to find a new niche, but it's like impossible to get into. Seems like every major streaming platform is going to need some experts for the foreseeable future given the install base of Roku at this point, and LLMs are horrible at it.

Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile

#30

Post by wiradikusuma »

Another thing is lead time. I built an app (https://signagesync.app/) to "multi-chromecast" websites and videos to Android TV, macOS, Windows and hopefully Samsung TV as well.

"Hopefully", because it took me literally 2 months waiting for the reviewer to test my app after it's submitted (to be fair, they did say "expect 6-8 weeks" upfront). They found some issues (crashes), so it was rejected, but I lost interest in resubmitting.

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