Today we are announcing full support for publishing HTML5 apps to  Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick as part of our existing HTML5 web app publishing toolset. This now opens up a new opportunity for web developers to publish HTML5 powered apps to the living room. In addition, developers with web apps already published to Fire tablets and Fire phone will now be able to release their existing hosted web apps on the Fire TV family of devices using the same workflow they are already using. To help support web apps on Fire TV devices we have made additions to the Amazon WebView, which powers web apps on our platform, to give developers access to the following features:

• Support for the Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick Remotes
• Support for analog input from the Amazon Fire TV Game Controller and other gamepads.
• Access to our In App Purchase (IAP) API via JavaScript
• A new starter template app optimized for 10 foot experience for creating Fire TV HTML5 media apps

By adding full support for Fire TV devices, developers can publish the same web app across all of our Fire devices and take advantage of the great performance enhancements the Amazon WebView offers.

Powered by the Amazon WebView

The Amazon WebView supports everything you have come to expect from the mobile version of Chromium. This includes WebGL, GPU optimized CSS3 Transition and fast JavaScript code executionWeb developers can now sell their web apps at a premium price, use IAP (via our JavaScript API), and have their app distributed right alongside native Android apps and games.

HTML5 Apps on the TV

In addition to our launch partners, we are excited to see what developers come up with to help push HTML5 forward onto the big screen. Through the Amazon Appstore on Fire TV devices developers can now deploy web apps and games to a whole new audience. HTML5 is a great cross platform choice for developers and we are now enabling them to reach even more customers than before. While traditional media apps make sense on the Fire TV, we are also looking forward to seeing HTML5 games and media apps evolve on this new platform. With support for WebGL, Gamepad API and accelerated canvas, high quality web games can now run on the TV. This opens up an entirely new world to HTML5 game developers hoping to build console quality games with the tools and frameworks they currently use to reach millions of web and mobile web gamers every day.

Getting Started

Bringing your web app to Fire TV is easy.  If you already have an app optimized for the 10-foot experience, you can get started by downloading the Web App Tester from the Amazon Appstore on your Fire TV or Fire TV Stick. Once installed, you simply enter in the name of your app and its URL online.

Likewise, you can also supply a .zip file to package up your app by following these instructions. After all the details are supplied, you can see how your web app will run on the Fire TV via the preview option.

If you are looking to get started building Web Apps for Fire TV or Fire TV stick, we have also provided an open source template on GitHub. Make sure to check out the online documentation that will walk you through everything you need to know about publishing HTML5 apps to the Fire TV family of devices.

Related Links

• Fire TV HTML5 developer documentation
• Web App Template on Github
• Publishing HTML5 Apps to Amazon Appstore
• Difference between Packaged and Hosted Apps
• In-App Purchasing JavaScript API

- Jesse Freeman (@jessefreeman)