Samsung’s $100,000 Challenge to Developers

Blog spam, actual source:<p><a href="http://mashable.com/2011/09/12/samsung-tv-app-challenge/" rel="nofollow">http://mashable.com/2011/09/12/samsung-tv-app-challenge/</a><p>Utter theft of article word for word.

So I have one of these TVs. Well actually I have a Blueray player that implements Samsung's SmartTV platform.<p>It's quite a nice platform - mostly HTML5, with some bits (eg video) implemented in Javascript instead.<p>If you want to get started with it, the instructions for installing the Plex app are pretty good: <a href="http://plexforsamsung.pbworks.com/w/page/40870394/How-To%20install%20Plex%20Widget" rel="nofollow">http://plexforsamsung.pbworks.com/w/page/40870394/How-To%20i...</a>

I took a look at the SDK when I bought my Samsung TV. It seems very bizarre because there are 3 different ways you can write an app:<p>HTML4/CSS2 (no, really.), Flash (ugh.), Lua/SDL (supposedly more for games than apps..)<p>I'm sure $100,000 will tempt someone, but browsing the SDK really reinforced in my head that hardware companies don't do a great job at software. I'm not sure quite how they wound up with this software stack, but it would have made a lot more sense to me if they embedded Gecko and had a single way to access the TV API and write HTML5/CSS3 apps.