While the battle of the set-top boxes appears to be heating up, we the loathers of clutter pray that all the recent hullabaloo around Apple TV and the Kindle Fire TV is merely a preamble to the day when dealing with an object of any kind other than your television is moot.

On that glorious day, everything you could ever want to do that involves screen-based content in your living room will be contained in a single, elegantly designed smart TV, and we relish each and every development that pushes us irrepressibly closer to it. Developments such as Norwegian software company Opera’s announcement earlier this month that its smart TV app-creation tool, Snap, has been upgraded with enhanced capabilities for broadcasters.

Opera is probably known best for its web browser, but its Opera TV Store has been quietly providing a HTML 5-based app platform on smart TVs and other connected devices since 2012. It’s now the engine of streaming video content on televisions, Blu-ray players and other products manufactured by the likes of Samsung, Sony, RCA, TiVo and many more. Opera Snap is the method by which video content providers get their wares onto that platform, and its latest installment aims to streamline the process in a major way.

“We saw there was a huge demand for all sorts of video content [providers] who wanted to be first-row citizens on [the Opera] TV store,” said Aneesh Rajaram, SVP for TV and devices at Opera Software, “but in order to get onto it they had to work with many app development agencies to create what we thought was really an extremely basic experience on smart TV.”

The new Snap offering, Rajaram said, helps broadcasters more easily “fulfill a great experience for end consumers to navigate the complex hierarchy of content types” including program guides, catch-up TV and live streaming. But most importantly, he continued, it “brings together support for HbbTV,” the European standard that allows for interactivity with free-to-air television on connected devices. “Previously broadcasters would need to create separate apps for a TV store or an app store, and another separate app for a HbbTV interactive environment, but this new version [of Snap] bridges all of that into one simple, easy-to-use interface.”

And when he says easy-to-use, he’s not exaggerating.

“We tried to make the barrier to entry almost zero effort needed,” Rajaram said. In fact, almost anyone has the ability to create a smart TV app for their videos using Snap, whether a major network or an individual making movies in their basement. A user on the French video sharing site Dailymotion for instance, which partnered with Opera Snap for its launch, will find a button upon uploading a video that says “publish to smart TV,” Rajaram said. “The moment you click that, you’ll have to accept some terms, you’ll have to choose a logo and background image, and then click submit. That’s it. you’re done. Suddenly you have a smart TV app that can go live to millions of users.”

The catch is smart TVs don’t want just any content available to viewers, and will screen videos for professional quality. But if your stuff is good, there is an easy Smart TV outlet for it via Opera Snap, and it’s entirely free to use, whether for media conglomerates or individuals.

Snap is free, Rajaram continued, “because the most important thing for us is to create heavy demand for consumption of video on smart TV. The manufacturers or operators pay us for every unit that they ship of the browser, so the more demand we create to get online video to consumers in the living room, the more chances we have to ship our core products, which are the browser and the TV app platform to manage all of this video.”

Meanwhile, TV app development agencies, according to Rajaram, can charge broadcasters and content providers between $100,000 and $400,000 for a single app, “which we think is rather expensive.”

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