The Fire TV home screen now features a new row called “Recommended By Your Apps.” This row shows content recommendations from your app, promoting deeper engagement and loyalty for your apps by showcasing your content to users who have an active interest in your material.

Today we’re excited to announce that the new Element Electronics 4K Ultra HD Smart TV – Amazon Fire TV Edition is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com, starting at $449.99.

Last December, we began rolling out a brand new user interface for Fire TV that puts your content front and center for customers. Customer reaction to the new UI has been overwhelmingly positive, and we continue to innovate to bring new ways to drive deeper engagement with your apps and games.

In an upcoming release, the Fire TV home screen will have a new row called “Recommended By Your Apps.” This row will show content recommendations that your app sends, assuming the customer has your app installed and opened it at least once. Recommendations on the Fire TV home screen will promote deeper engagement and loyalty for your apps.

In our upcoming webinar, Build and Test Web-based Apps for TV using Amazon Web App Starter Kit, Amazon Technology Evangelist, Mario Viviani will share how easy it is to deploy a fully fledged TV app on Fire TV using WASK.  

Today we are excited to announce that the all-new Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote, the most powerful streaming media stick available, is coming to the UK and Germany. The next generation Fire TV Stick with Voice Remote will also be available in Japan this April.

Terrestrial TV broadcaster STV shares how they created STV Player for Fire TV, the challenges they faced, and what the future holds.

The media landscape has undergone momentous changes since The Economist first rolled off the printing presses in 1843. This weekly newspaper has had a web presence for ten years, but recently direct competitors and social networks have begun to vie for a slice of their readers’ time. The Economist had to react.

Late last year, Amazon announced an over-the-air (OTA) update that brings support for standard Android notifications to Fire TV. To help developers make the most of this new update, we sat down with our Developer Evangelists to compile a list of our top tips for developing a well-planned push notification strategy. The result is our newest eBook: Best Practices for Push Notifications.

Amazon is excited to announce our newest Fire TV experience, with Alexa Voice Remote, designed specifically for smart TVs. Amazon Fire TV Edition elevates the smart TV experience by integrating the Fire TV experience directly into a new range of hardware from Seiki, Westinghouse and Element Electronics. The new smart TVs will help increase the reach of your apps by introducing them to a new host of customers, in the living room. If you are already developing for Fire TV your apps should automatically work on the new Amazon Fire TV Edition, for those interested in submitting to Fire TV, please take a look at our documentation.

If you’re considering building a media-based app for Fire TV, Amazon provides two frameworks to help you get started and accelerate your development: Web App Starter Kit for Fire TV (WASK) and Fire App Builder. In this post, we are going to take a high-level look at each of these frameworks, the particular skill sets they are built for and variations in their feature sets.  Let’s first take a look at WASK for Fire TV.

In parts 1-5 of this series we followed the user journey on Fire TV from browsing and content discovery to reading the details of specific content and performing an action. Now we end our journey on the best part: how to play the video!

The PlaybackOverlayActivity

In a Leanback-enabled project, playing video content is performed within the PlaybackOverlayActivity.

The UI of the PlaybackOverlayActivity is simple. We have a full-screen video player that is responsible for playing the content. On top of the video player is the PlaybackOverlayFragment, which is responsible for displaying all the media controls and managing the underlying content play back.

System X-Ray is useful for displaying system metrics on Fire TV, but did you know you can display information of your own choosing? Your app can send information to System X-Ray which will be displayed while your app is in the foreground. There are several ways this feature can be used, such as displaying static information, when a metric crosses different threshold boundaries, or when an event occurs. Let’s walk through some examples.

Examples

Static Information

If you test your app on multiple Fire TVs, you may have wished you could tell at a glance which Fire TV model you are testing. If you connect your Fire TVs to different WiFi networks, it would be helpful to see which network a Fire TV is currently connected to. System X-Ray can help you solve these problems. You can collect this information as your app starts up, and send it to System X-Ray.

private void updateMetrics(Context context, String buildModel, String ssid) {
    // Initialize Intent
    Intent intent = new Intent("com.amazon.ssm.METRICS_UPDATE");
    intent.putExtra("com.amazon.ssm.PACKAGENAME", context.getPackageName());

    // Add metrics
    intent.putExtra("Metrics1", buildModel);
    intent.putExtra("Metrics2", ssid);

    // Send
    context.sendBroadcast(intent);
}

We aim to create the best 10-foot experience for our customers and developers by making content discovery and engagement easy and enjoyable. We are excited to announce that, starting today, an over-the-air (OTA) update will bring key changes to Fire TV that will make discovery and engagement even easier than before. Fire TV will now support notifications and have a brand new user interface. The updated Fire TV interface will present a cinematic experience, offering video trailers and content screenshots to help customers access the content they want more quickly – without the need to open and close multiple apps. With over 7000 apps, games and Alexa Skills, the new and improved on-device experience will make it much easier for customers to engage with the content they love and discover new apps and games. This OTA update is currently being delivered to Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice remote, the two most recent members of the Fire TV device family. Earlier models of Fire TVs and Fire TV Sticks will also receive the update once available for those devices.

Providing the Details of the App Content through the DetailsFragment

In Part 1 of this series we analyzed the TV Interaction Model, based on three steps: Browsing for Content, Reading Description and Details, and Playing the Content. The first action, Browsing for Content, as we have seen in Part 3 of this series, is achieved through the BrowseFragment.

Now let’s see how we can provide information about a specific piece of content, following the second step of the user journey, Reading Description and Details. To do this we’ll use one of the main components of a Leanback-enabled project: the DetailsFragment.

The DetailsFragment

The DetailsFragment is displayed when the user selects a specific piece of content on the BrowseFragment. It contains information like Title, Subtitle, Description, and is accompanied by a preview of the content. It also contains Actions that we can prompt our user to perform.

One of the most important classes used in the DetailsFragment is DetailsOverViewRow. This class defines which content is displayed in the fragment (as seen in the previous episode, DetailsOverViewRow takes advantage of a Presenter, called DescriptionPresenter) and, most importantly, is responsible for defining the Actions that we can prompt our user to perform.

private void setupDetailsOverviewRow() {
    
    final DetailsOverviewRow row 
			= new DetailsOverviewRow(mSelectedMovie);
    ...
    row.setImageDrawable(R.drawable.default_background));
    row.addAction(new Action(ACTION_WATCH_TRAILER, 
				“Watch Trailer”, “FREE”)));
    
    mAdapter.add(row);
}

In the highlighted row we demonstrate how easy it is to add a specific Action to the DetailsFragment. Just by coding addAction() we can add a new Action for the user to perform. In this case we added the unique ID ACTION_WATCH_TRAILER, for the Action and two Strings “Watch Trailer”, “FREE” to define the text field of the button.

Once we have added this line, the Action will be displayed on the DetailsFragment.

By using Actions we can easily add IAP items like “Rent the Content”, “Buy”, or “Subscribe”. It is just a matter of attaching a Listener to the Actions to perform consequent tasks.

When we deploy a Leanback-enabled project, the only Action that is defined by default is the “Watch Trailer” that prompts the trailer of the content to play.

Stay tuned for Part 6: How to Play Video Content using the PlaybackOverlayFragment

In the next and final episode of this series we’ll show how to play the content, leverage the Remote Control, and how to show the on-screen controls using the PlaybackOverlayFragment.

Stay tuned!

Mario Viviani (@mariuxtheone)

Editing the user interface of a Leanback-enabled TV app through Presenters

In the previous episode of this series we discussed how to create the main interface of our Leanback-enabled project through the BrowseFragment. Now let’s take a closer look into the Presenter class. The Presenter class allows us to define the look and feel of our Leanback-enabled app without editing the underlying data structure. 

The Presenter class

The Leanback template we created was built following a custom version of the common development pattern, Model-view-controller (MVC), in which the Presenter class acts as the View. The Presenters are passed to the ArrayObjectAdapter as arguments and define how the content of the Adapter should be displayed

The Leanback approach provides a variety of predefined Presenters:

• CardPresenter defines singular content
• ListRowPresenter defines how various content in a row should be displayed and arranged
• DetailsDescriptionPresenter defines the UI of the DetailsFragment

Implementing the Presenters are quite similar: they all follow the ViewHolder pattern and are mostly composed by Custom Views with methods to set the fields of the views. Let’s take a close look at the customizing the CardPresenter as an example: