Samsung SmartTV?

Finding that Unity supports Samsung TVs was a little surprise for me. Unfortunately Samsung is the only supported brand and I did not find information about the planned support for other vendors' TVs and operating systems e.g. for LG's webOS or FireFox on Panasonic.

Smart TV in general is not really a game platform - TVs have performance problems and their remote controls usability is far from the standard game pad, so checking available games in SamsungApps and LG SmartWorld application stores I was not able to find anything that is worth to install and run. But it is not only Samsung and LG - comparing to others those brands are even doing pretty well because TVs from other vendors like SONY, Philips, Sharp, VESTEL, Toshiba, Panasonic, Grundig, etc. are ignoring games almost totally and they focus mostly on entertainment video and audio applications. Might be new Apple TV and android TV will bring some change there.

Working in the video streaming industry I have access to many Samsung Orsay (2012-2014 models) and Samsung Tizen TVs (2015), so I decided to launch a small demo to see how it works.

The important is that not every TV from Samsung is compatible with Unity. See the list of supported devices:

• http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/the-way-to-find-unity-compatible-tv.348988/
• http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/samsungtv-gettingstarted.html

On the other side I was able to install and run a demo application on every 2013+ TV model I found (including cheap low-end 2013 5xxx TV series). To launch the application in the debug mode, the Unity Launcher application needs to be installed and started on TV first. Unity Launcher is available in the SamsungApps application store:

Samsung Tizen Unity Launcher 

Samsung smartTV Orsay (2013)  Unity Launcher

Samsung smartTV Orsay (2014)  Unity Launche

To upload the application the FAT32 flash drive with sufficient space for game upload must be inserted into TV's USB slot. Once the Unity Launcher is started on TV it exposes the web http interface (using port 8899) for application upload, launch and for accessing debug logs from the Unity framework combined with Debug.Log() output from the application.

Unity Launcher web interface

In general my short test on few devices shows that using Unity it should not be a problem preparing a simple game for Samsung TVs. I did not face a single problem - everything during my test worked as expected, which is not really common situation in TV world:)