Digital signage on an Android TV box

We built a digital signage app for an Android TV box, a video in the middle with ads around it, first for Puncak Semangat Technology and then for a Giant pitch.

We’ve been building an Android app for a TV box. It’s new to us, working with a TV box, so I’m quite excited about this one. We’re doing it with the company that makes the box … they pitch the system to clients, and we design and build the app.

The idea is a TV that plays videos or ads, with ad spaces down the side and along the bottom. You can see these starting to pop up in waiting areas, like at clinics and grocery stores. People watch whatever’s on the screen while info or ads play in the other sections.

Puncak Semangat Technology

The first one is for Puncak Semangat Technology, who came to us through the TV box people. There’s a ticker along the bottom, and the line running in it is about Puncak Semangat winning the contract to build Malaysia’s digital TV network earlier this year. The video and the pictures down the side are just samples to fill the space.

After that I split the screen into zones: the video, a banner under it, a ticker at the bottom and a tall image down the side. Most TVs right now are 720p, so that’s the native resolution I design for. The same zones work in portrait too, with the side image moving down under the banner.

Building it

Testing is the tricky part, since every test build has to go onto the box. Good thing we can install them over Wi-Fi with adb, otherwise it’d be troublesome. This way the office TV stays put in our meeting corner.

It doesn’t need to go on the Play Store, so it’s just a matter of handing out the APK and setting the box up to read from a USB stick. We also tried a version that reads from a shared Dropbox folder, so several boxes can stay updated with the latest content, as long as they get online. The content is sorted by zone, and the ticker reads its lines from plain text files.

It’s an Android app, so it needs a launcher icon too.

Giant

The TV box people are also pitching it to Giant in Indonesia, so I did a Giant version. This one we’re doing differently … it’s web based, which should be a lot easier to manage and distribute. It has the same zones, with the Giant logo on a green bar along the bottom, and each zone shows a loading screen until its content comes in.

The demo content is all Giant’s own: one of their TV ads for the video, their flyers cut to fit the side and the banner, and ticker lines in Bahasa Indonesia and English.