title: Feature detection instead of user-agent sniffing on TV
body: <p>My team is considering developing for TV, and thought of designing a tailored "10-foot UI" to present our content differently on TV-sets.</p>
  
  <p>The only way I see it happening at this point is by sniffing user-agents to detect where the users are coming from. I see that there are some user-agents available for TVs, for instance:</p>
  
  <p><strong>AppleTV:</strong></p>
  
  <p><code>User-Agent: iTunes-AppleTV/4.1</code></p>
  
  <p><strong>Google TV:</strong></p>
  
  <p><code>Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; GoogleTV x.x.x; LG Google TV Build/000000) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/11.0.696.77 Safari/534.24</code></p>
  
  <p><em>However, we don't want to use user-agents unless we must</em>.</p>
  
  <p>On this often referred to article by Mozilla Developer Network, <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Browser_detection_using_the_user_agent" rel="nofollow">Browser detection using the user agent</a> they adamantly discourage the use of user-agents sniffing to provide special content, advising one to rather use feature detection.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Is there a single, stable and well-supported feature on TV browsers/systems that is easily detectable?</strong> If yes, what would it be?</p>