Can I display the current live TV feed in a full screen googleTV app

Question

In a GoogleTV full screen app, can I render the current live TV in a media control (for example the user might be currently watching House on NBC).

Since there is no such thing as a ticker or side app in googleTV (like there is in SamsumgTV or Yahoo! widgets) I would like to allow the user to continue to watch their show within the full screen app while also viewing simple app content.

Also, if you can do this, what is the best way to stub out and simulate the Live TV feed in the emulator during development and testing.

Answer 1

In a G+ hangout one of the Google TV developers mentioned that the live TV is implemented as an Android app. Other apps cannot get access to the live video stream.

If you look at this video at 1:30 you will see that Christian Kurzke from Google shows a screenshot of Google TV with widgets: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOPExK8WTz4 Since Google TV is based on Android I'm assuming that it should work exactly like the home screen of mobile devices.

The Google TV emulator documentation mentions that there is a way to emulate a live TV video source: http://code.google.com/tv/android/docs/gtv_emulator.html#Running

Answer 2

I am pretty sure that the TV stream is special. It is not an app, and it is not available to apps. I think GoogleTV has Picture-in-Picture so you can still watch TV while using Apps, but integrating the live stream is not possible, unfortunately. This is probably mostly due to copyright concerns from the media companies.