Building Web Apps for Google TV

Chapter 6. Tuning, Delivering, and Protecting Video Content

Now that you’ve learned how to design and develop for the 10-foot UI experience, we’ll turn to the most popular content consumed on TV: video. Whenever it comes to video content, developers and publishers on the web have many factors to take into consideration in order to ensure a good experience for users. This is especially important on Google TV because the video experience on big display devices like Google TV is expected to emulate, if not rival, the generally accepted viewing experience of high definition TV (HDTV).

To really achieve the best video experience possible, you’ll need to develop a good understanding of video delivery and make intelligent trade-offs among many variables. For example, you’ll need to learn about digitizing and editing your videos, choosing encoding formats, evaluating license and support issues, and selecting delivery options and protocols. You’ll also need to learn about how to optimize video based on factors such as compression quality, frames per second, pixel resolution, bit rate, and bandwidth.

Before we discuss these key factors and how they play out on Google TV, however, we’ll briefly recap some video basics.

Video Basics

Raw video files are ideal as far as video quality is concerned, but their sheer size usually hinders the speed and performance needed for online video, and also results in high storage and bandwidth costs. Subsequently, all web videos files are served in compressed ...