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!