Question

I’m developing an Android based remote app for Google TV that I want to have more intelligence than the standard Google TV remote. What I want to do is download the Channel Listing Provider information from the Google TV to my remote, so I could, for example, say “go to CBS”, and the remote would know which channel CBS was on the user’s cable network. I understand that the channel listings and their associated TV channel numbers are available from the Channel Listing Provider on Google TV. What I want to know is, can I directly access this information from Google TV by sending a call to the GTV box from my remote app running on my Android phone, or do I have to build a small app for the Google TV box in order to access that information and then shunt it to my remote app?

Thanks in advance for any help.
M-A Kuttner

Answer 1

You can only invoke the Channel Listing Provider on the Google TV device. You cannot access the provider remotely. For Able Remote, we created an app that runs on Google TV which provides a proprietary API for our mobile app to access the channel listing. For the voice commands, we find the closest matching channel and then use Anymote to fling the channel URI to the Google TV device to change the channel.