Here's how Sharp redefined home entertainment with a Smart TV app.

Sharp offers an impressive repertoire of high-end, technologically advanced TVs and other consumer entertainment products, and is certainly one of the globally admired brands. As an industry leader, Sharp commits itself to enriching consumer's experience through innovation and use of advanced technology

Sharp approached [x]cube with a clear mandate - to design and develop a mobile app that can interact with all of Sharp's connected displays, offering an unbeatable experience to its consumers.The vision behind was not only to build an app that controls the TV functions by replacing the remote but also offers complete digital experience to users by providing them access to apps, social media content and beam it on their TV.

Having developed over 700 apps, the [x]cube team, with its extensive expertise in understanding mobile space, laid out the mobile strategy to engineer a specialized connected display interface which will make a new mark in the Smart TV experience.

HOW DID WE DO IT?

Sharp engaged us to provide an end-to-end solution leveraging our expertise in mobile. And we did everything - designing, testing and deploying - by taking care of the software part completely while the required hardware components were provided by the manufacturers of Sharp TV.

As the software and hardware components are engaged in a tight-knit dialogue, we can't use the same app to communicate with any other smart TV. We also defined the requirements for them during the umpteen brainstorming sessions we had. They had a clear vision of what they wanted - a smart remote for their smart TV, and we gave them exactly that

But it was easier said than done. We started by giving them a lot of inputs on a few good features to have in the remote - and we both agreed that the remote cannot be an ordinary one to control volume or channel number, but it should be media- and content-driven.

Now, using this app, you can view the complete program guide and launch the program in the application or you can buy a video from portals like youtube and uloo, and you can launch the same service on the TV. Thanks to social media integration, you can now tell your friends "Hey, I'm watching this program on this channel, why don't you join me!" thus keeping people in loop.

Remote Control:

The app allows users to control TV functions like changing channels, volume control, access apps and everything else that a normal remote does. Beaming & Streaming: The app allows users to beam local content like pictures, videos, audio files etc., and also social media content from their mobile device on to their Smart TV. The app also allows users to stream movies from their mobile to TV providing relative content, viewing & sharing options.

TV Guide:

Users get access to all relevant information on shows, schedule on different channels. You can also set reminders & launch the show from their device. You can view programs choosing from a list of actors/directors or year-wise (last 10-15 years), and also based

Beaming local content from device, and streaming social content was a supreme challenge initially. The protocol followed by TV is different as it has its own protocol. So, sending data via that protocol was difficult - especially when it came to Social content, youtube doesn't give the facility to play directly i.e., if you take the URL and give it to the TV, it'll not decode it. So, we sent the decoded version of youtube URLs to the TV.

Other technical challenges included hardware communication overWiFi using IP commands. It was a first time implementation and hence it is completely dependent on the strength of your WiFi as the communication is WiFi-enabled. Our testing environment created a lot of issues initially as the internet strength wasn't good and sometimes there were quality issues too where we missed a few critical bytes while transferring the data.

The [x]cube team leveraged its extensive mobile experience, engineering proficiency, and intellectual properties to successfully overcome these kind of dependencies, technical hitches and issues, and develop the Smart TV app.

For social media, we went ahead and decoded youtube and other website content to give video URLs to TV. The solution we came up with is platform specific and we cannot have the same solution for both platforms when it comes to social media.

To enable smooth communication between the TV and the local content, we had to create a local server on the mobile device for all the content we wanted to send out to the TV. So, we listed out all the media files, made a server at our end and sent that particular file link to the TV using UPnP protocol. This solution worked very well as it just creates a server but doesn't use a lot of space. To overcome quality issues, we started monitoring how many bytes we're sending to the TV by using third party tools to trace the missing packets and figure out how they're missing, and then started fixing them one by one.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

As we had to support mobile and tablets, we changed the UI accordingly.

User can choose from any of the 8 themes and change the background.

All the images of TV guide are catchy.

The remote screen was designed keeping in mind two things to ensure that we give the end-user what he's used to: