App Stores are mainly associated with mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. But the store concept is picking up steam with televisions too, mainly due to the fact of the new Smart TVs.

Although TV companies have dedicated App Stores for their Smart TVs, Norway-based Opera Inc. have also announced their version of App Store for televisions.

Dubbed as the Opera TV Store, the store is actually based off a browser with all apps using HTML5 web standard. Theoretically, all TVs supporting the latest web standard will be able to use the store but that will not be the case as Opera plans to lock out on unauthorized devices.

The apps on the Opera TV Store will be installed on the cloud but Opera has tried to emulate the experience similar to installing on a TV, which in my opinion is quite nice. And for those who’re wondering what will happen to the apps if a user turns off or logs out from the service – the apps will stay since the store and apps are tied to TV’s unique ID.

As of now, all I could find was free apps on the store but Opera plans to add paid apps in the near future.

The Opera TV Store will be released this year with a “global TV maker.”

Check out a brief rundown of the TV Store below.

Engineers at Opera Software would be giving the CES 2012 visitors the chance to witness the app revolution. In simple words, they will showcase what consumers can expect from their TVs in 2012.

“If the Mayans were right and 2012 is the end of it all, we’re starting off with a bang,” said Tatsuki Tomita, Senior Vice President, Opera Software. “We’re transforming the TV experience by bringing the world of HTML5 apps to TV sets, Blu-Ray players and set-top boxes all over the world. And, that’s only part of what we’re showing.

Here’s some of the things they have delivered for consumers that will enable us to enjoy our TVs in a more interactive way:

Opera Devices SDK with Media Streaming Option – This would iron out the buffering issue with videos from web, as Opera’s adaptive streaming solution ensures that the video content adapts to the bandwidth available and local resources present to give an optimal viewing experience. Their media streaming option supports Apple HLS, Microsoft Smooth Streaming and MPEG DASH.

DLNA support – Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could stream content from one device to any other device in your home? That’s what DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) is all about. In the Opera Devices SDK with DLNA option, you can find other DLNA-certified devices and stream content between them. It could be videos from your media server or photos from your mobile phone.

This sounds interesting, we will definitely be visiting their booth at CES 2012 to witness this revolution and give you our first-hand opinion. Till then, you can visit – http://www.opera.com/business/tv/ for more information.

Opera Mini has played a very important role in the success of Opera Software. The Norwegian company has now announced that this nifty little browser – responsible to improve browsing experience on feature phones – has surpassed 100 million monthly users. This means more than 100m users used the Opera Mini browser on their phones to surf over two billion page views.

Opera Mini is a browser that works on almost all mobile phones and features tabbed browsing, speed dial, password manager and compression technology to compress web pages by up to 90 percent to deliver webpages faster.

Norway-based Opera Inc. has released the latest version of its Opera desktop browser. The Opera 11.10 codenamed as Barracuda is touted to have smarter features and faster performance over its predecessors.

The beta version which can be downloaded from Opera’s website brings in features like an improved Speed Dial that now removes the limit on the number of speed dials, better plug-in support, CSS3, Web Open Font Format (WOFF) and Google’s WebP image protocol support.

Opera 11.10b

App Store is one of the lucrative business models in the mobile phone industry and Opera, who is predominantly a browser company today jumped onto the bandwagon with their version of store known as the Opera Mobile Store.

The store has been created in partnership with Appia and since it’s web-based, the store is compatible with almost all smartphone OSes (excluding iOS, of course). Another thing that works in favour of the store is that Opera will push the link to more than 100m users using Opera browser on their mobile phones.

The store can be accessed from the link below and is available in more than 200 countries.

Opera Mobile Store

Opera might lag behind from the competition in the desktop browser race but it’s a different ball game when it comes to mobile devices. They rule the mobile market and this month’s State of the Mobile Web report is a valid proof of that. They’ve passed a whopping 100 million users who use Opera on their phone, including 90m of Opera Mini and 15m of Opera Mobile. Needless to say, that is no easy task.

Opera also confirmed to update both its mobile software – Mini and Mobile this year. More interestingly, Opera browser will bring support for tablets including the iPad.

The first preview of the new browsers will be shown at the MWC next week.

[Via Opera]

Opera has just released the final version of its Opera 11 browser for desktops. The browser that was in beta last month is now available to all using Windows, Mac or Linux. New features Opera 11 includes are Tab stacking that allows users to stack their tabs for better management, extension support, Visual Mouse Gestures, 30 percent better performance, improved address field showing the security and trust info of the website and on-demand plugin loading.

Download Opera 11 from the link below.

Product Page

Opera has released the first public beta of Opera 11 desktop browser. The Opera 11 adds some nifty features like the new Tab Stacking that allows users to stack multiple tabs, grouping them into one. Opera has also added Visual Mouse Gestures that gives you a visual feedback of a particular mouse gesture and extension support.

Users can download the beta for Windows, Linux or Mac from the link below.

Download Page

[Via My Opera]

Norwegian browser maker has launched its Opera Mobile 10.1 browser for Android users. The beta version of Opera Mobile is now available on the Android market for free. If you’ve used Opera Mobile on another platform, there’s not much to talk about but if you’re a first-timer, Opera boasts lots of advantages like tabbed browsing, faster page rendering and loading, bookmark syncing with Opera Link, Opera Turbo for data compression and Geolocation support.

Users can get the beta from the Android market or point phone’s browser at m.opera.com/next.

Press Release

Opera has released the first alpha version of Opera 11 browser. It’s an iconic version and in fact the first Opera version to add support for extensions and browser add-ons. Developers can create various browser-enhancing tools using Opera’s API and web standards like HTML5 and JavaScript.

Additionally, the latest Opera does have the previous version features like the Speed Dial, Opera Turbo, Unite etc.

You can download the Alpha version – not to forget, buggy – from the link below.

Opera 11