Hoodcast

A calm, remote-first community board for Fire TV. Residents browse notices, events and lost & found with just a D-pad; publishers update it live from the web. Built natively for Vega OS.

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Inspiration

Useful community information is often scattered across chat groups, posters, and conversations. A resident might miss a water-service notice, a local event, or a lost-and-found post simply because they did not see the right message. We wanted to make these updates visible on a screen people already share: the TV.

What Hoodcast does

Hoodcast is a community bulletin app built for Fire TV. Residents use the TV remote to browse Notices, Events, and Lost & Found, open full details, and return to the card they were viewing. Community Brief highlights current updates, while Ambient rotates through posts when the app is idle.

A separate Content Management app lets an authorized publisher create drafts, edit posts, publish them, and remove them when they are no longer relevant. Published changes reach the running TV app without rebuilding or reinstalling it. If the connection is interrupted, Hoodcast displays its last available feed with a stale indicator and refreshes when service returns.

How we built it

We built the TV experience as a native React Native app for Vega OS, with D-pad navigation and focus restoration. A TypeScript API serves the public feed and post details over HTTPS. PostgreSQL stores the content, and the protected publisher app manages its lifecycle. The TV checks for feed revisions so it can apply content changes while running.

Challenges

TV interaction needed careful work: every screen had to remain usable with D-pad, Select, and Back, including returning focus to the right card. We also had to handle an unreliable connection without leaving the screen empty, and verify that a publisher’s change reached an already installed TV app.

Accomplishments

We demonstrated the complete publisher-to-TV flow: create a private draft, publish it, see it appear on the running virtual device, edit it, and remove it from the public feed. We also built and tested release packages for three architectures and verified the app’s navigation on the Vega Virtual Device.

What’s next

We want to test on physical Fire TV hardware, improve the publishing workflow based on community feedback, and expand how residents can respond to useful posts.

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