Top smart TV app development companies in 2026

TL;DR

The top smart TV app development companies in 2026 are ranked here across ten vendors, from full-stack engineering firms to no-code OTT platforms, with fit notes for fitness and wellness brands. We scored each on shipped TV apps you can verify, platform breadth including Amazon Vega OS, verified client reviews and continuity of the business itself. Mercury Development takes first place: 500+ engineers, Apple TV work shipped since 2011, fitness clients including Tonal and Fitbit, and a 5.0 Clutch rating across 34 reviews.

• Streaming took 48.5% of US TV time in June 2026, so the biggest screen in the house is no longer optional for a subscription fitness product.
• Amazon began replacing Android with Vega OS on Fire TV in October 2025. Only three vendors here publicly claim Vega readiness.
• Two of the ten are platforms rather than agencies. Pick by how much of your product is content versus features.

Smart TV viewing in 2026

Streaming is now the default way Americans watch TV. Nielsen's The Gauge put streaming at 48.5% of US TV time in June 2026, and on Christmas Day 2025 it hit 54%, the largest single-day share ever recorded. The average US home owns 2 smart TVs, per Hub Entertainment Research.

For fitness and wellness brands, the money follows the screen. The fitness app market reached $12.1 billion in 2025, and Grand View Research projects $33.6 billion by 2033. Your members already train in front of the largest display they own. The open question is whose workouts live there.

Vega OS and the 2026 platform deadlines

Two dated shifts should shape any TV app contract you sign this year.

Amazon is walking away from Android on Fire TV. The Fire TV Stick 4K Select shipped in October 2025 as the first Vega OS device, and Amazon confirmed in April 2026 that all future Fire TV Sticks will run Vega. Existing Android apps reach Vega hardware only through the Cloud App Program, a bridge Amazon tells developers to migrate off. The native path is React Native for Vega.

Google Play's target API rules reach TV too. Per Google's current policy page, Android TV apps targeting Android 12 or lower stop being discoverable on newer devices after August 31, 2026.

So ask every vendor what they ship on Vega OS and which API level your Android TV build targets. The answers separate active TV practices from portfolio pages.

How we evaluated

Every list like this claims rigor. Here is what we actually checked, and the same criteria repeat in the cards below.

• Shipped TV apps you can verify in a store, a case study or a press release.
• Platform breadth across Tizen, webOS, Roku, Fire TV, Android TV and Apple tvOS, plus stated Vega OS readiness.
• Verified reviews, with Clutch ratings and counts cited where a profile exists.
• Business continuity: team scale and any ownership changes a procurement review would surface.
• Fitness and wellness fit: named clients in connected fitness, coaching video or wellness data.

Company comparison at a glance

1. Mercury Development

Mercury Development has built software since 1999 and treats the TV as one screen in a member's day, next to the phone, the watch and the machine on the gym floor. Its 500+ engineers have shipped 1,500+ apps used by 50M+ people, and the public portfolio includes Tonal and Fitbit on the fitness side and Apple TV work dating back to 2011, when the team built aTV Flash for FireCore. It also created Ellpa, its own no-code publisher that takes a video library live as an Apple TV app within 1 week, the fastest honest answer we know to "how soon can we be on the TV screen". For wellness data, the firm builds to HIPAA and GDPR requirements.

Best for: fitness and wellness brands that want TV, mobile and wearable delivery from one accountable team.

Facts: founded 1999, HQ Fort Lauderdale, FL, 500+ engineers, Clutch 5.0 with 34 reviews.

2. Accedo

Accedo has shipped TV apps since 2004 at a scale most agencies cannot match: 600+ employees, 400+ customers, named work for HBO, Paramount, BBC and the NBA. The case fitness buyers should study is FloSports, where Accedo expanded the smart TV apps in 2025 and later enabled subscription purchases directly on the TV.

Best for: enterprise OTT programs with broadcaster-grade requirements and budgets.

Facts: founded 2004, HQ Stockholm, 600+ employees, Clutch minimum engagement $50,000+.

The honest minus: pricing and process are enterprise-tier, and much of the offer is built around its Accedo One product rather than bespoke work.

3. Oxagile

Oxagile is a video engineering house first. The New York firm, founded in 2005 with a 250-999 team, lists the deepest OS matrix in this comparison, down to Titan OS, VIDAA and Vega OS, and its portfolio centers on live sports streaming, including a modular app running one codebase on 13 platforms.

Best for: streaming products where the video pipeline matters as much as the app.

Facts: founded 2005, HQ New York, 250-999 employees, Clutch 4.9 with 13 reviews.

The honest minus: flagship CTV cases are anonymized, so you cannot check the claims against live apps before a call.

4. FX Digital

FX Digital does connected TV and nothing else. The London studio of roughly 70 people builds and certifies apps for BritBox, Discovery+, Eurosport and ATP, including bringing BritBox to Vega OS. The case worth reading is GCN, the Global Cycling Network, whose Apple TV app logged 180,000 views in its first month while playback success rose from 90% to 99%.

Best for: CTV-only builds where certification experience across broadcast platforms is the point.

Facts: founded 2011, HQ London, team about 70, Clutch minimum engagement $25,000+.

The honest minus: a boutique with a UK and European broadcast center of gravity, so large multi-region programs will stretch it.

5. 24i

24i has built streaming apps since 2009 from Amsterdam, and its Video Cloud stack powers MGM+, RTVE and Tastemade. Speed is the pitch: its personalization layer was production-ready for MGM+ within six weeks. The catch arrived in March 2026, when parent group Aferian entered administration and 24i was sold to Sapphire Technology Group. The brand and client list continue.

Best for: operators and networks that want a product stack with services on top.

Facts: founded 2009, HQ Amsterdam, offices in Madrid, Brno and Bath.

The honest minus: the March 2026 ownership change is recent, so ask direct questions about roadmap and support commitments.

6. Norigin Media

Norigin Media has designed and certified TV apps from Oslo since 2004 for BBC, Eurosport, Deutsche Telekom and Vevo, which picked the firm for CTV app validation. Its engineering is React-based, and it open-sourced its spatial navigation library for TV interfaces, a sign of real 10-foot UI experience.

Best for: React-based TV apps plus device QA and certification across European operators.

Facts: founded 2004, HQ Oslo, offices in Madrid and Timisoara.

The honest minus: a small Nordic-centered team, and consoles and Vizio are absent from its stated platform list.

7. Applicaster

Applicaster is not an agency. Its Zapp platform, live since 2009, assembles cross-device OTT apps from configurable modules across tvOS, Android TV, Fire TV, Roku, Tizen and webOS. Volleyball World's VBTV, built on Zapp, reached 1.5 million members with 77% year-over-year growth.

Best for: content brands that want many storefronts fast without owning code.

Facts: founded 2009, HQ New York, operates in 12 countries.

The honest minus: a subscription platform with a plugin model, so features outside the module library are where costs and delays hide.

8. Float Left

Float Left has built OTT apps from Jupiter, Florida since 2009 and describes itself as one of Roku's earliest development partners. Its FLICAST platform runs apps for NBC Sports, Sesame Workshop and MagellanTV, and the portfolio includes GroupHIIT, a workout brand, which makes this one of the few shops here with a shipped fitness OTT app.

Best for: Roku-first content brands that want a managed app platform.

Facts: founded 2009, HQ Jupiter, FL, covers Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, webOS, Vizio, Tizen.

The honest minus: media-entertainment centered, with no verified Clutch reviews and an ownership history that changed hands through iMedia Brands.

9. Stormotion

Stormotion is the fitness specialist on this list, just not yet a TV one. The Tallinn studio, founded in 2017, built the Force USA training app in 4.5 months and the companion app for the STEPR stair-climbing console. Sports and medical work make up 60% of its focus, and its BLE and wearable depth is real.

Best for: connected fitness hardware companion apps where mobile and BLE come first.

Facts: founded 2017, HQ Tallinn, 10-49 employees, Clutch 5.0 with 17 reviews.

The honest minus: no publicly documented shipped smart TV app, so treat TV claims as capacity to be proven, and scope accordingly.

10. Zco Corporation

Zco Corporation is the veteran generalist: building since 1989 from Nashua, New Hampshire, with 1000+ projects delivered and clients that include GolfLogix and Massachusetts General Hospital. A 250-999 person bench makes it a safe pair of hands for mobile and enterprise software.

Best for: generalist mobile and enterprise builds where TV is a minor add-on.

Facts: founded 1989, HQ Nashua, NH, 250-999 employees, Clutch 4.8 with 58 reviews.

The honest minus: no dedicated TV practice today. Its smart TV content is a blog archive, and none of its public reviews describe a TV project.

Which company fits your fitness platform

Ranking is one thing. Fit is another, and in fitness it splits by the product you run.

If you sell connected hardware, the TV app is a companion surface: workout data lives on the machine and the phone, and the TV carries the coached session. You need a team fluent in BLE, wearables and video at once. Mercury Development and Stormotion sit closest to that profile, with Mercury the only one of the two carrying shipped TV work.

If you run a video-first coaching brand, you are probably on a template platform already. Buyers we talk to keep describing the same ceiling: they want an aggregator-style experience in the spirit of Roku or YouTube TV, with programs, progress and search in one place, and the template cannot express it. That is the moment for a custom build from Mercury Development, FX Digital or Oxagile, or a structured platform like Applicaster or Float Left if content remains the whole product.

If you are a studio or gym chain, start smaller. Your members want schedules and on-demand classes on the TV without a login fight, and a no-code route like Ellpa or Zapp gets you there before a full custom program does.

The TV app is a retention surface

Here is the opinion part, stated plainly: a fitness TV app earns its budget on retention, and almost nobody scopes it that way.

Acquisition happens on the phone. Nobody discovers your product by scrolling a TV storefront. But cancellation happens after weeks of a member not finding the next workout, and the TV is where that discovery either works or dies. When fitness operators describe churn to us, the pattern is rarely missing content. It is content the member could not surface from a couch with a five-button remote.

The second failure mode is live. A scheduled class puts every member on your infrastructure in the same ninety seconds, on living-room bandwidth, with no touchscreen to recover from an error. If a vendor demos a beautiful browse screen, ask instead what happens when a stream drops mid-plank.

So scope the TV app around two hard requirements, discovery from the couch and live session resilience, and treat pixel parity with mobile as decoration. The vendors worth hiring will agree.

Written by Rob Devereaux, Chief Operating Officer at Mercury Development. Rob has run the firm's operations from Hudson, Ohio since 2019 and has over 20 years of operational and financial experience. The evaluation criteria in this ranking follow the vendor and project reviews he runs on the delivery side of the firm.

Taking your fitness platform to the TV screen? Get a phased scope

You have the shortlist. The next decision is scope: which platforms come first, what stays on mobile, and what the TV app must prove before you fund the full device matrix. Tell us about your platform mix and member journey, and we will send back a phased plan you can put in front of your board.