Responsive Web Design For The Internet Connected Tv

This paper investigates the use of Responsive Web Design, a popular technique for adapting a web page to different devices, in the context of Connected TV devices. Although all modern Smart TVs feature a web browser, its use is very limited, while user surveys reveal serious usability issues. One of the major problems with TV web browsing is that there are very few TV-optimized websites. Most of the web content is designed for Desktops, which causes a number of usability issues, making the experience very frustrating for the TV users. This situation looks very similar to the early days of web on mobile phones. It took some years until a large number of websites became mobile-friendly and now it has become a standard practice. Responsive web design helped this adaption, since it was no longer needed to design a separate website for each device, but a single one that adapted depending on the user's device. This technique has not yet been applied for TV websites, and this is what this paper investigates. We explore the convergence of Responsive Web Design on Smart TVs and apply this technique on a typical News website which is responsive for Mobile, Tablet and Desktop by adding an additional layout adaption for TV. Consequently, this website is tested on the three most popular TV platforms. Conclusively, we propose guidelines on how Responsive Web Design can be exploited for Smart TV web browsing.