Category: focus-wtv

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!