Svensk Fastighetsförmedling continue their strive together with Avantime to be not only the best on the web but also being the first to utilize new cool technology to attract customers and market real estate for their clients. Svenkfast.se has won the web service awards two years in a row, Svenskfast was the first real estate company in Sweden, and among the first in the world, to market their houses on the iPhone. This time they are the first real estate company in the world to join Philips‘ new NET TV initiate. Owners of a NET TV enabled Philips TV can now find their dream house, apartment or vacation house sitting comfortably in their sofa!

NET TV brings the best of web to your TV through an easy to use portal without needing a HTPC or other set-top boxes. Svenskfast, YouTube and SL are among the first applications available on the Swedish portal and part of Philips marketing of this new ground breaking feature. I’m very proud of our initial application which was designed by one of our newer Avantime Group family members, Mattias Olsson, at Dreamsville. Here’s what the application looks like on the TV (filmed at Avantime), unfortunately it’s not easy to film a TV screen.

So what is NET-TV, how does it work? A NET TV enabled device has a built in web browser developed by Opera, and features a portal developed and maintained by Philips. All applications are web based, built using the CE-HTML standard together with CSS and javascript. This is really awesome because it doesn’t require additional skills or development tools to build an app unlike building an app for the iPhone. Philips do provide an SDK with a TV emulator and CE-HTML/CSS validator, but I would recommend buying a NET TV enabled TV for development. In our case, the NET TV app is built as an extension to the existing website, resulting in the worlds first NET TV enabled EPiServer site.

Developing a NET TV site/app has a unique set of challenges compared to building a standard computer browser site:

  • The TV screen itself is a challenge: it has a set resolution of 1280×720 with no scrolling possibilities in CE-HTML mode (it does when browsing normal html sites however). The end user is also sitting much farther away from the screen than a traditional PC screen so all elements must be big and easy to read/understand.
  • There’s no mouse or keyboard which makes user input a bit of a hassle. Therefor the user interface must be simpler and require less input than a traditional web site. We decided to keep input at a minimum by using the keypad to interact with functions.
  • Naturally the TV doesn’t posses the processing power of a standard computer (my model has a 300Mhz CPU of an unknown brand), JavaScript animations such as what jQuery is capable of doesn’t run smooth, timers should be avoided in general.
    Although it features a 100Mbit network interface as well as a wireless network connection, images and objects just don’t download as fast as a traditional PC. Optimizations are key to create a responsive and fun to use application.
  • The color range on the TV doesn’t match a PC monitor. Colors can look very different on the TV and gradient images don’t work well at all. Philips provide a tool for crunching images to fit the TV but gradient images especially doesn’t look good at all.

In many ways building a NET TV app is much like building an iPhone app: Less is more and KISS. Also, Philips has, just like Apple does for Appstore, an extensive validation process. Fortunately they are helpful and forthcoming in solving issues.

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