The One Must-Have Feature that your TV is Missing
You won't find this feature listed on the spec sheet of your new TV. Just a few years ago, you could only find it used in high end TV production studios. Recent technological advancements have brought this powerful and exciting new capability direct to your living room!
Imagine being able to dynamically add a scrolling live sport score ticker to the top of your TV. It updates whenever your favorite team scores, and otherwise just fades away.
How about your front door camera feed popping up in the corner of the screen whenever the doorbell rings?
Would you like to be able to text your family and have it also show on your TVs?
Or perhaps forward the notifications from your phone (and Caller ID) to an elegent notification on your TV?
These are all made possible by a feature known as graphical overlays. From a technical standpoint, it is a dynamic video layer that can be transparently blended on top of whatever you are watching.
In the past these could only be done using expensive dedicated video mixing hardware like the Lumantek ez-Pro VS10. Even then, this was usually a manual process or required writting your own custom software to do any of the above.
Today we have smart TVs, the latest models which use Android TV, Fire OS, or Tizen can now perform these hardware blending operations WITHOUT ANY OTHER HARDWARE! If you don't have one of these TVs, most Android or Fire OS media streaming boxes (think Fire Stick) can also perform these functions. All you need is the right app and a little bit of time to configure what you want it to do.
SplashTiles is one of the best ways to make this dream a reality. Setting it up to do what you want does have a few steps which we will outline here:
- Setup your cloud account (will need the $25/yr plan for overlay feature)
- Download the app on your TVs / streaming devices (Google Play or Amazon Appstore) and link them to your account.
- Design your overlay using the Screen Wizard and the drag & drop dashboard
- Setup your triggers
- On some devices you need to give overlay permissions to the SplashTiles app
- Enjoy!