[bradyemerson]

It would be awesome to have an enhanced now playing / second screen ability where additional information could be supplied to the mobile app based on what's playing. It would be awesome to browse character info, scene locations, interesting facts, etc. A lot of information is out on Wikia for movies and TV (like this one for Top Gun covering characters, planes, ships, and more), but I don't know if the site is structured enough to write something generic. I think it would probably need to be modular / addon based so second screen addons could be written for specific shows or movies, like other metadata scarpers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_screen

[topfs2]

There are plenty of secondary applications available for Kodi, both official and non official. I think you need to be more specific if your missing something from them?

EDIT: For the official ones look at http://kodi.tv/download/ and under "Other software"

[bradyemerson]

I have Android devices, so I can only speak about Kore... Kore's Now Playing page is a great start, but I wouldn't consider it a second screen application as all it shows is the episodes summary and links to IMDB for the actors. Second screen applications have more rich, context-specific information:
- Game of Thrones: Family Trees, Map of Westeros / known world
- Top Gun: Information about the planes, ships
- Star Trek: Information about the species, planets, ships, etc.

I provided the link to Wikia, as a lot of this type of information has been created on this site. However, I don't think the Kodi developers should integrate with Wikia, but instead develop the framework for pushing this type of richer information about what is playing (some sort of data model to store this, and we, the developers, can write the scrapers to populate). Apologies if this already exists, from what I can find, only summary and character/actor names can be stored currently.

[topfs2]

The main problem with stuff like this is that there exist no site which has this data structured, and its rather impossible to structure it as it depends on the content your watching. So basically what you'd end up with is that kore for example could link to an off site, wikia for example.

So what you could at most do in a second screen application is that you auto show a certain site for an episode/show/movie etc. But which site? AFAIK there is _no_ site which covers this nicely in a condensed matter. Wikipedia would be the closest but its far from as nice as demos showcase second screen.

In short I think whats missing is the site to show. Kodi sends out events with rather universily unique id's (imdb, tvdb etc). It is very possible to create an application which reacts to this and show a second screen site fitting, if you can link imdb -> that sites link. If you know any site/api which links this please share it. Creating that kind of database would be rather hard. If tmdb or those sites started gathering wikipedia links then it would be possible to link to wikipedia.

In the end, this is why no other app has done something like this, the content is simply missing

[bradyemerson]

I believe we're saying the same thing... there isn't anything universal or structured enough to build this feature around it, but I do believe it's possible to establish the framework. I see a couple ways to do it, but I think the easiest would be to define a new type of "Now Playing Info" addon which receives the currently showing information (IMDB, tvdb, name, etc.) via an event. Each active addon of said type could then respond with whether it has information for what is playing.

Say you have a wikia, twitter, and GoT specific addons running. You're watching GoT, so on the Now Playing screen, all three of these addons appear as available. Clicking into one takes you into that addon, where it has defined it's own menu structure, views, and data storage.

The point of making it modular is that a developer could try to integration with Wikia, or Wikipeida, or some specific site for XYZ show. Kodi doesn't have to be concerned with the fact there isn't a universal model or site for this, the community handles the complexity.

Agree this has never been done, at least in a generic, reusable way, but that shouldn't be a reason to not do it :-). Someone has to be first.