About
We have been doing this for eighteen years and never said so.
The short version
- 2008
- Team members here build their first HbbTV applications, for SES Astra, before the specification looked the way it does now.
- 2011
- The HbbTV work is split off internally under the RedSmart name, with its own team.
- 2016
- RedOrbit becomes a GmbH.
- And then nothing
- We never marketed any of it. The work arrived through the industry, one broadcaster telling another, and that was enough for long enough that building a website never reached the top of anyone's list.
That is why an eighteen-year competence has no web presence, and it is worth saying plainly rather than letting you wonder.
What changed
We finished a tool. A small version of it had been in the Chrome Web Store since September 2021 — remote keys, a 720p frame, MP4 playback, and not much else; it never got past 0.7, and Chrome's move off Manifest V2 ended it. What replaced it is the thing we always wanted while working: a television on your desk that does not need to be a television. That one turned out to be good enough to give away.
The small one was installed 6,155 times over five years, almost entirely by people we never heard from — it had no telemetry either. Giving the real one away means those developers arrive here. So there had better be a here.
RedOrbit
RedSmart.TV is a brand of RedOrbit GmbH in Feldkirchen near Munich, founded in 2009. About eight people. The wider company is a Drupal agency, which sounds unrelated until you notice that every broadcaster application in this portfolio is fed by a headless CMS, and that somebody had to build that too.
Christian Heyer is the managing director, and the person who answers the contact form.
Narrowness
Why the emulator is narrow
People ask whether the emulator will also cover Tizen, webOS, Titan OS and Whale OS. It will not, and that is deliberate. The question comes up most often about the last two, because they run HTML5 in a browser and look like the easy case — but what the emulator emulates is the OIPF DAE object model, not a browser, and those platforms do not have one. An emulator that offers more than the target device teaches you the wrong thing — and the moment a tool claims to stand in for five runtimes, you stop testing on the devices that actually matter.
Narrowness is the feature. It is also, roughly, our position on everything else on this site.
Tell us what you are building.
Christian answers these himself, usually within a working day.