Can Samsung's MultiScreen SDK Make TV Apps a Thing?
SAN FRANCISCO — Samsung announced a bunch of new developer tools features at its first Samsung Dev Con earlier this week, but the one that really caught our eye was its new MultiScreen software development kit (SDK) . The idea behind the MultiScreen SDK is to let developers create more seamless experiences between apps on a phone or tablet and on a TV. The idea is that you can fling content from an app on your phone directly to your television set and then have that content play off of the TV, not your phone. If you think this sounds a lot like Chromecast , you'd be right. However, there is a key difference. Much of Chromecast's implementation involves the DIAL standard, which lets apps "discover" compatible devices that it can send content to. Then it basically sends out a URL that launches an app or instance. Where Samsung's MultiScreen SDK goes a step beyond is that it allows both the discovery of other screens and provides a way for further cus...