Philips NET TVI attended and spoke at a breakfast seminar hosted by Philips and DoRight Group together with Mårten Wahlström from Svensk Fastighetsförmedling last week. Mårten spoke about their NET TV initiative and I spoke about our experiences at Avantime when we developed the NET TV application “Hitta Hem” I’ve written about earlier. I was very happy to hear that Philips were so impressed by our application that they use it for promotion purposes in Europe!

Philips started the seminar by presenting their roadmap for NET TV what was happening with the platform in general. Apparently sales were a success, there are 80.000 NET TV enabled homes in europe already! How many NET TV enabled TVs that has been sold in Sweden still remains a secret though. Philips had some good news about the support from other manufacturers, many of the major TV manufacturers are already sitting in the CE-HTML boat or are about to join. This is huge for the CE-HTML standard and for companies looking to develop NET TV applications! I would love to see Samsung, LG and Panasonic to use the same platform.

Philips also announced that they were working on a public SDK for NET TV! I got a comment on my last post asking about this and I think a public SDK is fundamental for establishing NET TV as THE internet TV platform. Currently you need to go through a somewhat complicated business process to get your hands on the SDK. No date was given for when we could expect the public SDK.

If you are interested in NET TV and don’t have access to the SDK you can check out the code for our Hitta Hem application. NET TV requires that pages are returned with CE-HTML as content type to work properly on the TV so if you point your normal browser to a NET TV url it won’t render it as a normal HTML page. For testing purposes etc I added a workaround to visit Hitta Hem through the browser, by appending the query string “test=1″ you will get the response with normal html content type. Note that the code is exactly the same, only the content type differ. Because it’s made for NET TV it won’t function very will in your browser but you can have a look at the code. Here’s some URL’s to different pages in the application:

Start page: http://www.svenskfast.se/NETTV/?test=1

Filtered navigation: http://www.svenskfast.se/NETTV/Default.aspx?test=1&loc=Stockholm+(län)

Search result: http://www.svenskfast.se/NETTV/SearchResult.aspx?test=1&loc=Stockholm+(kommun)

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