Another HTML5 App Store, With More Dev Tools: This Time, For TV

Neck-and-neck with AT&T's new HTML5 app store comes galloping another HTML5-based store, for another kind of device: your television.

Earlier this week Opera announced the new Opera TV store, described on the official website as follows:

The Opera TV Store is a storefront running from the cloud, showing a collection of web applications optimized for television screens. Using HTML5, developers can create cross-platform applications that work on any device running the Opera TV Store.

So far, so much another not-just-personal-computer HTML5 app store -- which is exciting for the standard, and also for interoperability in general. And probably legitimate competition for AT&T's U-verse enabled APIs.

For developers, Opera also released a TV emulator, to ease development for the differently-standarded device. Sure, your HTML5 apps may run; but will they look right on a television screen? and more importantly, will the relatively-underpowered devices customers use to view content through their television be able to handle your (non-native) apps?

The Opera TV developer site, in fact, is full of useful resources, including quite a few instructional videos -- providing a much better sense of what this HTML5 store could mean for developers, than AT&T's business-centered announcements have offered so far. 

So check out the news, the official Opera TV site, or the developer-specific site, and tempt yourself with more (and non-gaming) HTML5 development opportunities for the living room.