Optimizing your site for TV is now easier

"Ever since we launched Google TV last October, we’ve seen web developers optimize their sites for TV with amazing results. However, designing a 10 foot UI and implementing controls optimized for the television is still a foreign concept for most web developers. Understanding that challenge, we’re happy to release new templates and a UI library to make it easy for developers to optimize their sites for TV.

Google TV comes with the Chrome browser that supports familiar technologies such as HTML5, JavaScript, CSS and Flash. Keeping this in mind, we have created two template designs in HTML5 and Flash that are focused on delivering video content, but equally suitable for photos or other multimedia:

For those developers who prefer to design their own 10 foot UI, we’ve created the Google TV Web UI Library to enable TV friendly controls such as D-pad (up, down, left, right) navigation. To accommodate different web developers needs, the Google TV Web UI Library is provided in 2 different flavors; jQuery based and Closure based. Get started by downloading the library and reading the documentation and tutorials.

Both the templates and the library are available under the Apache 2 license. As always, we love to hear your feedback. Please post comments and questions on the library and templates to our Google TV Web Developer Forum. Happy coding!

By Steve Hines and Daniels Lee, Google TV Developer Relations Team