LG And Friends Form The Smart TV Alliance

LG and TP Vision, representing Philips TVs, have today announced the formation of a Smart TV Alliance. The goal of the alliance is to create a "non-proprietary ecosystem for application developers to create attractive, platform-independent services," with several Japanese television manufacturers said to be in the process of joining already. It looks like TV manufacturers are wary of developers being bearish on the development of apps for multiple Smart TVs, aiming to simplify things instead.

LG's Bong-seok Kwon and President of the Smart TV Alliance confirms the current difficulties, saying that "the Smart TV industry was a very difficult market for both TV manufacturers and application developers as TV's from different brands used different platforms and technologies." He goes on to say that the new move should help developers "create more and better TV applications."

The Smart TV Alliance will make an SDK available to developers that can be downloaded for free, which will use technologies such as HTML5 and let applications run on any Smart TVs no matter what platform they're running. The Alliance is already thinking ahead too, with the release of SDK 2.0 planned for the end of the year that will let developers create apps for the 2013 line of TVs.

That's all very well and good, but you need all the manufacturers on board to achieve such a vision. The Alliance says that any new members are allowed to join the newly formed Smart TV Alliance Consortium, allowing participants to set the technical standards that will allow developers to achieve cross-TV support.