Some of the world’s major TV makers have agreed to work together to create a new international infrastructure which will allow them to create Smart TV applications that will work across all TV brands.

Founding members LG Electronics and TP Vision (Philips’ TV arm) have established the Smart TV Alliance with a mission to create a wide and productive ecosystem for Smart TV application development. The infrastructure should give manufacturers a swifter path to more and better TV applications and give the rest of us a rich bed of content and services.

The primary objective the consortium is to help define the technical specifications that will enable application developers to create their applications once but run them on multiple TVs on many different platforms.

LG Electronics’ Bong-seok Kwon, President of the Smart TV Alliance, said: “Before today, the Smart TV industry was a very difficult market for both TV manufacturers and application developers as TVs from different brands used different platforms and technologies. Smart TV Alliance creates a larger playing field which encourages developers to create more and better TV applications at the same time giving manufacturers and consumers the richest source of movies-on-demand, music services, games, social networking and more.”

To help facilitate this style of developmental process, Smart TV Alliance has allowed the first version of its software development kit (SDK) to be available free on its website. The SDK is based on open web technologies such as HTML5 and allows for developed web applications to run on Smart TVs from participating members regardless of the underlying platform.

Other members will be announced on the Alliance’s website www.SmartTV-Alliance.org in due course.