Building an IPTV player for Samsung TV — dev diary #1

Published August 31, 2026 · Updated October 23, 2026 · By the KimberPlay developers

This is an August 2026 development snapshot of KimberPlay for Samsung Tizen. It is not a release announcement: the Samsung app remains in development. Check the Samsung status page for availability.

Why Tizen needs a separate implementation

A Samsung TV does not run Android. It runs Tizen, Samsung’s own operating system, where apps are web applications driving the TV’s native video pipeline. Nothing from an Android app carries over — not the language, not the UI toolkit, not the player. Supporting Samsung means writing a second product from scratch and then maintaining both forever. For most one-developer IPTV apps, that is the end of the conversation.

What makes it worth it for us

A household may use both Samsung TVs and Fire TV devices. A Tizen player could let those users keep the same product experience without adding a streaming stick. Our plan is for it to use the same Plus licensing system; it is not available yet.

What the development snapshot included

A running app. Onboarding with M3U and Xtream login, channel groups, favorites on the remote’s red key, and remote-first navigation with the calm-premium look.
The now/next guide, fed by a single-pass XMLTV parser built for TV-browser memory limits, with the same conservative guide name-matching as Android — a line-for-line port proven by the same test corpus, to help detect differences between implementations.
License activation against the same backend; a Samsung TV counts as one of your five devices.
Strict separation: the Android app stays the canonical spec; the Tizen app shares tests and a backend, never code. A bug fixed on one platform is pinned on both.

What’s between here and the Samsung app store

Hardware truth. The make-or-break question is the TV’s native pipeline playing the real-world stream soup — raw MPEG-TS live channels, HLS, the codec spread of actual providers. That testing happens on real panels, not simulators, and it decides defaults we refuse to guess at. After that: Samsung’s app review, which for an IPTV player means demonstrating exactly what our whole platform already is — player software only, no content, bring your own playlist.

Want the moment it ships (and the beta before it)? The Samsung TV page has the current status and contact information.

← All posts · New here? KimberPlay is a free IPTV player for Fire TV, Android TV, Windows, Linux and compatible browsers. Choose your setup guide. Player software only; no channels included.