Category: focus-wtv

Official WTV app also available 🙃

Why did I create a WTV Android TV app when there’s an official app? Good question, I’m glad you asked.

In 2023 I had a good look around and was unable to find any WTV app for Android TV. I started a proof of concept, but because I wanted to do it “properly” with WTV login for accessing on-demand content, I quickly ran into trouble and gave up (and due to time constraints).

A few months ago, I picked the project up again but lowered the bar by only supporting live stream which is the most important use case for me anyway.

However, I made the mistake of not properly scouting the current ecosystem. I did so in 2023, but this time I only checked WTV’s website and the app store. Nothing to be found for Android TV, so I thought everything stayed the same (I figured they wound’t have the budget or something). But later, when I searched the play store for my app on an Android TV itself for testing, I discovered there does exist an official app now! When I check the Play store metadata, it does indeed mention a publication date of Sep 27, 2023. Although, badly advertised, if I may say so 🙊 In March 2025:

  1. The app was not mentioned on the website.
  2. The mobile app can not be installed on TV.
  3. The mobile app listing does not mention the TV app listing.

Nowadays, you can search the play store for a different type of device than the one you are currently operating. That way you can find the TV app more easily, but I forgot to check that and I also guess a lot of people don’t know about this. At the very least, nobody expects that an app that cannot be installed on Android TV, still has a TV sibling app (under a different app id). There is no technical reason (at least not today), so I still think they should at least “merge” the listings. It would boost visibility of the TV app in a huge way while making it much easier to install from a different device (browser or mobile/tablet).

In the meantime, I noticed they updated the website to include a “Smart TV” button. On the live stream, they also started to advertise the TV app. So it seems progress is being made. 😊

Given how I already had a working app and found my app a little more snappy, I decided to go ahead anyway. I also like to use it on my tablet. Before, I had good hope that my app would survive as there was no alternative. Given there is already an official app now, I can only hope the RMM (the company behind WTV) will allow my app to exist. If something would be non-compliant, I’m happy to make any required changes though.

If anything, it was a fun experiment trying to use flutter on Android TV!

Focus WTV Live v0.0.13

I finally succeeded in releasing the Focus WTV Live app for Android TV. The biggest hurdle was getting through the Play store approval process. Rejections without any clue about what was going wrong. It doesn’t help that Google has disabled the Pre-launch report, running your new build on various hardware, surfacing problems you would otherwise never find out. I suspect Google has disabled pre-launch report in favor of AI payloads. 😉

So when you do encounter such a problem, without the pre-launch report combined with useless rejection feedback, you’re really in the dark. Well, I did figure it out after all, but it took lots of effort and adding crashlytics reporting which otherwise would not have been needed. It turned out to be a video player issue on low-end (read: crappy) hardware. Oh well, all’s well that ends well..

Enjoy West-Flemish regional TV:

Cord cutting – The final thread

10 years ago, I cancelled my cable TV subscription and switched to internet streaming-only using the first Android TV device, Google’s Nexus Player. It was a great cost saver. I never watched live TV to begin with, as I always wanted to skip forward during ads. My new home was Netflix and having no ads was a breath of fresh air.

In the beginning, I would miss some Belgian content here and there, but by now, every major Belgian TV channel has a free app streaming live TV and on-demand content (with paid options to reduce ads or watch additional content).

My parents barely watch TV except for the news, so I suggested to make some savings and cancel their overpriced Telenet cable TV subscription. It turns out there’s only 1 problem: they like to watch the regional news channel WTV from time to time.

Streaming WTV to an Android TV device, what are the available options?

  • Android TV app:
    the Focus/WTV app is not available for Android TV.
  • Cast from phone:
    casting a stream from the Android app on your phone is not supported.
  • Cast from website:
    casting from the website is supported, but the stream hangs after a few seconds and refuses to resume.

Ideally, my parents can just use an app on the TV, it makes things less complicated.

So, what is the solution? Create a new app! 😉

A few years ago, I gave it a first try, but somehow did not succeed. Maybe I was trying to support login and on-demand content. Yesterday, I lowered the bar and thought just streaming live content would already be sufficient (it’s what my parents do now).

To my surprise, I quite quickly had a working proof of concept. I was still using the project I created a few years ago using an old flutter version. So I upgraded the flutter version and it no longer worked on my Nvidia Shield TV, but it still worked on the emulator. It does not render video anymore, only audio. I also tried out the latest flutter 3.29.2, and even though I do get image again, it’s all red.
Long story short: don’t use impeller yet for hardware-acceleration sensitive stuff like video streaming.

I would show a screenshot, but there’s nothing to see but the live stream. 🙂

Stay tuned!