With Sensy + PatchWall, MiTV is India's first Hybrid Smart TV. The story behind the collaboration.

Today, we are so excited. Sensara's constant efforts to upgrade the TV experience for Indian viewers sees light through Xiaomi's MiTV.

Over the past 1.5 years, we have been closely associated with Xiaomi, to understand how best to serve a TV audience. Today, we launch, and we are all so excited to get your feedback.

We believe the age of better TV UX is here. Sensy is now integrated deep into MiTV's PatchWall OS. This means, an AI-powered engine learns and serves you the best shows to watch from Broadcast TV.

To enable this, Sensara has made a USB-based InfraRed Blaster, also known as the Mi IR Cable.

This means,

• You can say good bye to those linear guides on TV.
• You can say good bye to multiple remotes for your TV session.
• You can switch and surf between the Broadcast TV and Internet TV world at ease.

All of this - through one seamless experience on PatchWall. Take a look. It seems so intuitive, you will say this is obvious. It's taken both teams a lot of work to get here.

While people go gaga over the advent of the new age of TV Experiences, I have a story to share. A story of persistence, trust, cooperation and cultural exchange.

I first met Jai Mani 3 years back. He liked our work in our previous company Pugmarks.me, and was interested in exploring working together. We told him about our switch to the TV industry and gave him some demos. He gifted us a Mi 4, and told us the phone has an IR emitter and Sensy on the Mi 4 would make a lot of sense. We realised it's one thing to help people discover what to watch on TV, but it's totally something else to make people switch channels. Imagine using the Uber app to discover that a cab is around the street, and then running down to hail it. The transaction needs to close on your app. The Mi 4 gave us a fantastic opportunity to help people discover what to watch on TV, and immediately switch to the channel.

Samsung and Peel had done this before. But for a company like us - a small start-up with 5 engineers, Jai presented us an opportunity. Our software, optimised for a hardware experience - can easily be distributed by a mobile brand. We would not struggle to distribute.

Our foray into close hardware integration started at that point. We still treasure that Mi 4.

Jai saw our work on the Sensy app, and made us pitch to Hugo Barra. Hugo loved our app's experience - and suggested this can become bigger. "What is the end game? Where do you see all this go eventually?". I thought for a few moments. "The TV. It belongs in the TV." Hugo was smiling, "Can we get there... fast".

At Sensara, we were convinced that the TV deserves better, and our destiny is beyond just an app on the mobile phone - playing second fiddle to the TV remote. We gathered forces and made ourselves TV First.

All this was well over a year ago. But we would launch with Xiaomi only after several more trysts.

In the meantime, Smart TVs were on a roll in India. Flipkart and others were seeing close to 100% year on year growth in the sale of Smart TVs. Flipkart itself has been a flag bearer for pushing more Smart TVs in the market. They convinced BPL to get back into TVs, helped created a new brand around Vu, and I believe had a role to play in convincing Xiaomi to launch TVs in India.

TVs are a massive business. A modern TV company cannot just rely on margins on hardware. They need other ways to engage and monetise viewers. Smart TVs present a strong opportunity because viewers are connected to the Internet, and the TV UX has more ways of making money through advertising and paid content.

Mobiles have evolved to be a Swiss army knife for people. People use them to communicate, read, entertain, capture memories, and even for work. The app model worked great. Any attempt at predicting what people want to do next has failed. Mobiles are tools. People want to get to their tasks fast.

The Smart TV experience industry for long has tried to mimic a smart phone in user experience. Most Smart TVs you buy today show you "apps". But then, TVs are a single use case device. They are just for your entertainment. Even more so - video entertainment. Does the same UX model of smart phones apply for TVs? No.

And Xiaomi knew this quite well. They have 100s of people in a dedicated MiTV division, that only thinks and breathes TV. They have been re-thinking their TV Experiences ground up. Their PatchWall OS is a big success in China. They call this approach, "Content first". And not "App first".

By now the people in Xiaomi Bangalore had turned friends. We were evaluating every new mobile phone they released, and tested them for compatibility with their infrared emitters. We had even collaborated a bit with their MiRemote team. A turn towards a deeper partnership came about when the MiTV team did a roadshow in India, meeting content owners and broadcasters to learn about the state of the Indian TV industry. Everywhere they went, people told them Broadcast TV is big in India, and a good Smart TV should have Broadcast Smarts.

Sudeep Sahu, probably the biggest Xiaomi evangelist ever, called me on one Friday evening. "Hey, Bharath, our MiTV team from China is here. Can you come over on Saturday and demo your work? I think the timing is right." I looked at my wife, and she was like, "Ok, another weekend gone."

I met Dong Wang, who architected PatchWall. We did a brief demo of how we augmented a Smart TV with an Infrared Blaster, and brought a Smart Netflix-like UX to all of Broadcast TV. You could just say, Switch to Cricket, and the TV followed. Dong seemed impressed, and with a limited vocabulary told me, "This feels like PatchWall. We believe in content first". Later on, Dong became a good friend, and confessed, "I had studied English in school, but never used it. I actually started speaking in English only during that India trip." They went into a Chinese huddle. A Chinese huddle happens when in a meeting - they go off into internal conversations in all Chinese. All I could do was stare at Sudeep for about 10 minutes. He was on the same page as me. Dong came back to English. "Can you visit China next week? We want you to present and meet our boss."

How does one demo a Smarter Broadcast TV outside India? The signals won't reach. Set-top boxes will show black screens. We got a video shot in our office. I was careful to speak in slow English, and repeated the important things a few times.

In Beijing, we met the MiTV team and Wang Chuan, Xiaomi co-founder and Head of MiTV. When I started, I told the audience, "Please pardon us for a longish 20 minute video. We believed this is the best way to show our work." They sat through it. Some saw it again. They went into a Chinese huddle. They said they want to work with us. The video had worked!

Dong Wang had turned a champion to integrate a better Linear TV experience, and along with Janet, they took time off to explain Wang Chuan why this is necessary for India. We were seated in another room, and had the company of a Chinese MiTV. Harsha Padmanabha, my colleague, and I saw through their UX. Being insiders in this industry, and knowing everything that's happening - from Android TV to Fire TV to Alexa to Netflix, we were sure PatchWall was the best TV experience ever made. Harsha and I were like, "Wow, this is so much work. Will they ever be able to make it work for India?". A content-first experience implies you know all the content people care about. The Chinese won't know the difference between Salman Khan and Rajnikanth in India. Or that the Tamils won't like seeing Hindi movies on their TV screen all the time. Being content first means you have taste. A taste for what people want. This is an editor's job. Even algorithms need subject matter experts to train them. This is hard to do.

Dong came back and told us, that they want to partner with us. They want MiTVs to have the best experience for Broadcast TV, and they believe we can help.But how do you make the MiTV change channels on set top boxes? We proposed, "We have this Bluetooth based Smart Remote. Can you package this?". "But not all of our Smart TVs have Bluetooth. Besides, if we package a Smart Remote, it will make the TVs more expensive." Now, we have gone this far. We had to make this happen. We quickly chatted with our India team, and explored if we can make a low cost Smart Remote. The Smart TVs already have a computer inside. They have USB ports. They even have WiFi. We proposed that we will make a new USB based Infrared Emitter device. This would be inexpensive enough for them to consider bundling it. It is a valuable accessory for consumers too.

With just 6 months to launch, venturing into a new hardware device is foolishness. It would be so, but for the super human efforts of our engineers - Adityanag Nagesh and Hormis Tharakan. They designed a new hardware device from scratch on a completely new chip, built prototypes, made them work seamlessly on MiTVs, and even managed a mass production effort just in time. Well, our office is busy packaging these devices even now. Once setup, the MiTV is a breeze to use and makes users swim between Broadcast TV and Internet TV. You have to see it to believe it.

We are a startup. We are nimble. We can do jugaad. But we are still used to seeing people sleep over issues. People here always say, "Ok, we have discussed enough for today. Let's meet again to conclude." Our Xiaomi friends don't like to sleep over issues. Once when we had a bottleneck with our industrial design, the IR emitter's wire would not fit snugly inside the USB casing. Coco - who is in charge of hardware and procurement, asked us when we can resolve it. It was a weary day in Beijing. We told her, we will discuss and get back by tomorrow. She replied, "No. Now. Now.". There is a joy to working with Chinese. Their limited vocabulary in English ensures we get the message fast. She brought a huddle. Interrupted their industrial designer from his smoking break - out in the Beijing cold. She brought everyone from the Xiaomi side to the alley (no time to look for a meeting room), and asked for the problem to be resolved. We made calls to our Chinese wire vendor. She took our phone and a few minutes of Chinese later said. "Yes. Yes." I was overjoyed. I looked at Aditya. He was too. But he was shivering. He did not even have time to wear a jacket while stepping out.

Our first prototypes of what would become the Mi IR Cable used ready made plastic usb casings. Wang Chuan looked at them, and said they won't ship them. A product needs to look good. We believed it was impossible to do a new industrial design in the time we had. We had taken 3 months to design our Sensy Remote, and another 3 months to get the injection moulding tool done. We said a launch would be impossible unless we used ready made plastic. Xiaomi insisted on a new design, and the industrial design was done in 1 week, and the tool in 4 weeks. Infact, we had to wait for a lot longer for the chips to arrive.

I got another taste of Xiaomi's design principles. Again, said in just a few words. Our coder friend, Hua, from the PatchWall team saw the old design and the new. He had this to say. "Old design. Looks cheap. But when Xiaomi does things, it should be Good, but cheap." I have repeated this a 100 times to people. Affordable Innovation needs a lot of work. It's important for every person in a company to breathe the company's mission. We were seeing this in practice.

PatchWall's user experience is unparalleled. And Indians will love it. Xiaomi has juggled with a lot of partnerships to make this happen so fast. We are privileged to be part of this cohort. We have learnt a lot, and have a lot more stories to tell. Together, we continue to work to give you the best.