Seoul, Amsterdam, San Ramon – Founding members LG Electronics and TP Vision (for Philips TVs) have officially established Smart TV Alliance with other Japanese TV manufacturers in the process of joining. The Alliance forms a cooperation that aims at enhancing the Smart TV experience by creating a non-proprietary ecosystem for application developers to create attractive, platform-independent services. The names of other players that are joining the Alliance will be announced accordingly on the Alliance’s website.

“Before today, the Smart TV industry was a very difficult market for both TV manufacturers and application developers as TVs from different brands used different platforms and technologies,” said Bong-seok Kwon of LG Electronics, President of Smart TV Alliance. “Smart TV Alliance creates a larger playing field which encourages developers to create more and better TV applications.”

Alain Perrot, a Smart TV Alliance Executive board member from TP Vision said: “Instead of spending valuable time on porting and testing on different platforms, developers can focus their creativity solely on realising apps that consumers will enjoy.”

The founding Smart TV makers have established a Smart TV Alliance Consortium to help define technical specifications which will enable application developers to create their applications once and run them on multiple TVs regardless of the platform.  Smart TV Alliance will make the first version of its software development kit (SDK) available on its website, which developers can download at no cost and use to develop their applications.