In a press release, Opera has announced the Opera TV Store, which it calls "a complete HTML5-based store solution for connected TVs". The store offers optimised apps for TVs, providing a lean-back web experience, which developers can create using cross-platform technology, says the company. The dev.opera website provides insight into how you can get started, and links to tools including an Opera TV emulator.
We spoke to Patrick Lauke, an Opera web evangelist who is working on TVs and devices, about the thinking behind the Opera TV Store and his thoughts on its utilisation of web standards. Lauke said that while Opera has been on TVs and other connected devices for years, the new store is a different proposition: "It's based on the same Opera Devices SDK, but it's not so much a web browser to access the 'wild' web as a separate environment purely tailored to the delivery of TV-optimised, web-based applications." This, said Lauke, is down to TV browsing presenting a different interaction model, due to the user's distance from the screen; the store offers no traditional browser UI, instead giving you a dashboard enabling access to curated apps.