Google TV
tv.google
tv.google
2010-05-20: Google introduces Google TV at Google I/O (https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/announcing-google-tv... , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASZbArr7vdI)
2014-06-24: Google introduces Android TV at Google I/O (https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/09/introducin... , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3dCUPeyhag), a rebranding of Google TV
2017-02-28: Google introduces YouTube TV (https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/finally-live-tv-made-fo...)
2020-09-30: Google introduces Google TV, which might be a rebranding of Android TV back to Google TV, but I'm not sure.
To make this more complicated/interesting - Google renamed the Play Movies and TV app to "Google TV." I'm guessing so you can have Google TV on Google TV?
Will the Play Movies app on my existing Android TV open the Google TV launcher like shown off here, or is it still just a browser for the content I already have?
Is the change to Android TV just that this app becomes the launcher?
What is a launcher?
If Android TV is an OS, then what is a launcher for an OS?
And I guess you're as confused as I am as to also what this has to do with the previous Play Movies and TV app.
On Android systems, a launcher is the home screen plus a little more. iPhone doesn’t have this concept as there's only one "launcher": the home screen. On android, however, you can install apps to radically change your home screen layout. Some are terminals, some are just A-Z lists of your apps, etc. A launcher on Android TV would be more significant because it would probably include movies, shows, and music instead of just apps.
Having been a prolific Android TV user for years, this appears to be just yet another reskin. No new functionality.
If you search for "popular launchers" you should be able to find some examples
DOS is your Operating System. You can use Windows 3.11, GeoWorks, or DeskMate as your Application Launcher.
Open shell [0] is the up to date one.
It's just like a Chromecast (HDMI dongle), but running Android TV.
The closest comparable thing may be Nvidia's Shield.
“Launcher” is the Android term for a graphical shell, the thing from which you launch apps.
The promo talks about Google TV on mobile Android, but I gather that’s a reskin of the Play Movies and TV app, not the Chromecast/SmartTV launcher experience.
GMail, GMaps, and GDocs, were simple and to the point. Then institutional rot happened.
Same thing that brought down intel.
Like intel (of the past). You can coast and the money will keep coming in. Up until it doesn’t.
Eventually, everything of consequence ended up with the suffix, and they finally dropped it.
But say what you want about Microsoft. Somewhere out there there's a publicly accessible doc describing the naming. And probably a video too. *
* https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/partners/videos/micr...
https://github.com/Azure-Samples/media-services-dotnet-live-...
On the cloud side, Azure has way better service/product names than AWS: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/aws-prof...
The e-mail I got from Google specifically mentioned that Google Play Movies and TV on Android mobile devices was being renamed (and in US only), so maybe it is still Google Play Movies on Android TV? It would still be weird, though, so who knows...
(And, the sites screenshots vs the play store screenshots differ - suggesting it hasn't rolled out to the region I'm in yet...)
Play Movies & TV (the Android app and service for purchased video content), has been around for a while, but it's just been rebranded as Google TV.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/30/21492549/google-tv-app-pl...
3/4 through the season, the producers kill off the most popular character. No reason is given.
Oops, got the first link wrong on Android TV. Should have been this: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2014/06/android-tv...
Apple has Books, Pay, Wallet, Store, App Store, One, and TV. All they’re missing is Cast and Go!
2) Apple does not create apps for other platforms as a source of profit. They have never done that. To guess that they would do that now is a gigantic leap in logic.
This is why I’m so reluctant to look into modern TVs. The quality on my mid-range 2014 Sony is pretty average at best by today’s standards, but at least it’s not smart enough to know what I’m watching and has no network connectivity.
This also means I can’t easily control it with a smartphone without something like Logitech Harmony which is just awful in UX, but still… it can’t track what I’m doing on the TV either.
And then there's Intel which literally reused numbers for its Xeon series so you have to check the chipset/socket type otherwise you could be 10 years off.
And then there's RAM where vendors will put numbers like "3600" after say 2400Mhz RAM because it's that product's series number but knows full well that it's also a common clockspeed. You'd think they're just trying to trick you and do an upsell to fools but sometimes they also go the other way as well. I don't think they realize how confusing it is
So yeah, Google isn't doing that bad
And paid support for all Google consumer services.
It's not a Chromecast, as we used to understand them - it's a full Android TV device with a new skin/launcher called Google TV.
It is, essentially, an updated Nexus Player, a competitor to the Nvidia shield and cheaper no-name android stick devices. One can hope it will be easily rooted, thus allowing for some interesting potential uses.
It seems to be not quite exactly that, Android TV seems to still be an active brand; Google TV is a new UI on top of Android TV. OTOH, since it implies Android TV, once all new devices with Android TV are also using the Google TV interface, I'd expect Android TV to stop being an actively-used brand.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.androidcentral.com/what-goo...
Will this be different? I doubt it. I'm not putting more money into Google hardware to find out that they'll break it and then lose interest.
Meanwhile my second gen Apple TV is working great.
https://www.amazon.com/Lithium-Battery-Charger-Rechargeable-...
Would you have been able to know in 2015 that the Nvidia product was going to be supported, but the Logitech one would be abandoned?
Real question actually. I doubt it, but that's a weakly held opinion.
But ... DRM.
And as much as people love bringing up Google deprecating stuff, I still trust them far more on updating this than any outside company.
Which is a shame, but the Squeezbox world was perfect in that hardware and software worked perfectly together and it could integrate with services like Spotify, but you could actually also use it with your own music. Try that now, to have a central multi-room system for audio that is not dependent on external services.
To answer the original question: I don't trust any tech company that tries to blur the lines between physical products and digital services. That is, I don't trust any of them anymore.
Of course, the application needed to communicate with the remote via USB, which I don't think was natively possible in the web browser at that time.
Harmony remotes are merely the least bad option.
The Nvidia shield is still amazing although I'll chime in saying my OG rechargeable remote has also failed. The new one takes AAA batteries. Bleh.
That's preferable in my opinion, because then you can just keep rechargeable AAA batteries on hand and switch them out. Cheaper than proprietary un/removeable rechargeable batteries, more accessible than those coin batteries. (At least here)
https://9to5google.com/2020/09/30/android-tv-replaced-google...
However casting was unreliable. I never figured it out but I remember posting on HN about it years ago and other people had the same complaint.
Then the YouTube app on my android phone would hang or crash. My Android phone kinda rotted after 4 years or so. I had a dedicated one for chromecast.
Now I just use a wireless keyboard and an Ubuntu box connected to the TV. Works quite well, I can get all the apps and content I want through the browser.
I don't see why there would be any problem with Netflix in HD in the browser on Ubuntu ?
This PC is also from 2012 or so, so I think I should upgrade and maybe the frame rate will improve... I haven't isolated the issue. It's fine for most shows.
But I suspect Netflix encoding quality also sucks, because most people don't care as much as I do, so I haven't debugged it.
Because there isn't a browser released on Linux that has the right DRM capabilities to run Netflix's DRM, and thus Netflix on Linux is limited to less-than-HD, hence why I asked if you were able to get it working.
The thing I notice is more the frame rate than the resolution. The resolution looks HD to me -- I can tell the difference with offline videos.
Hm I suppose it is possible I am getting some degraded quality from Netflix. I always thought it was because of the old PC and/or their bad encoding quality.
I mainly watch non-demanding video on Netflix, like a cooking show or standup comedy ... YouTube is definitely HD for me.
https://android.gadgethacks.com/how-to/netflix-caps-video-qu...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/c26pc0/netflix_1080...
The Chromecast to Device connection is lost after about 10 minutes, making all controls not work. Can't pause, skip, select a new episode, etc.
The fix is seemingly random - maybe 50% of the time recasting from the app (Netflix, Hulu, etc) works. 30% of the time mucking around in the Google Home app will work, and 20% of the time I just have to unplug it.
Near as I can tell it's agnostic of client device, casting app, Chromecast gen (I've got 3 different versions around), or router.
We've kindof just given up and gone back to Roku.
Could be any number of reasons why you are having issues unfortunately.
I'm certain the onset of the problem didn't coincide with a new router, and I've gone through a couple since it started so I assumed that wasn't the issue.
I went from a bargain router to a nicer mesh setup this spring and the problem just vanished overnight.
It didn't work for me but loads of people reported success with it. It's a shame because I loved the Chromecast but had the exact same issue as you describe.
I can't tell if you are serious.
I can imagine circumstances where this would work, but... they involve the chromecast having a temp sensor and software to lower the clock speed to prevent overheating, resulting in skipped frames, but at the same time somehow not be able to lower the bitrate of the video stream.
Seems... mildly improbable.
It used to work years ago, but as more and more software bloat has been added to run in this thread, the delays have increased to the point of stutteryness.
Some videos are jumpy because they have fewer seconds buffered in the hardware decoder.
Reason Shield TV is still doing great is because they didn't cut any corners and future proofed in a way no one expected it from nvidia. It's great. It complely replaced my 6700K + GTX 1080 powered HTPC because streaming games from my PC to shield was easier than using windows from 10 ft away.
I was a little worried that it stops getting updates, but now I just have no reason to upgrade it because it's getting all the updates and performing great. I got the new dongle tho because it cost as much as new remote for shield...
Only weak points of 2015 shield to me: game pad was trash, remote control was large and yet easy to lose and bend.
There is just so much wasted potential there. We have a "legit" security system that my wife wants to turn on expensive $50/month monitoring on, and I have been fending her off saying look we have all these motion detectors and cameras in the house, Google will pull this all together and do it 10x better, but it seems that day is never coming.
Style over content, and the presentation just plain getting in the way of the information, to the point that the user ends up leaving rather than finding out what the site is attempting to convey.
Awful. Just awful.
This was not within reason.
LineageOS[2] has a site with a decently readable source code. They also don't have exactly what you are looking for, but the <img> with id="rotate-on-scroll" (The spinning phones) and the related script[3] look like they could somewhat related -- you could probably change the transform in the script to accomplish what you're looking for.
[0] https://www.w3schools.com/w3css/
[1] https://www.w3schools.com/w3css/tryw3css_templates_parallax....
[3] view-source:https://lineageos.org/ (lines 1247-1263)
Achieving the parallax seems to be easy enough, but combining it with all these aminations seems a bit more tricky. The animations are more complex than animate.css's approach of just animating when the component is displayed - you can play the animation in reverse by scrolling up rather than down.
I've seen the New York Times and BBC produces stories told in that parallax / animated type way and it's very effective. I'm guessing therefore that they use a standard parallax approach and them one or more animation libraries together; I was hoping there was one neat library that brought it all together but maybe that's asking for too much.
Also, I wasn't even sure if I should have expected a "Specifications" section, which was the reason for me to scroll all the way down to the end.
Absolutely horrible.
I am curious what they've used to achieve the endless scrolling type parallax. A while back I looked for libraries to achieve this and didn't find anything other than fullPage.js which doesn't seem to have an option for this (only full page transitions).
Jokes apart, I am not buying that this time is different. as much as it pains me to say, google needs a little power to the product managers to push through a consistent vision of consumer product side.
It makes me wonder if there is anyone working at Google who understands what the term "value added" even means.
Maybe they should just buy Roku and crap on that. After all Roku is moving into an analytics for sale company away from a streaming company. Why? Because everyone wants to be a portal but they can't afford to be with the studios demanding extortionate sums for their content. So instead of getting money for bringing you the content (because they have to pass on more than they can afford to the content owner) they sell their observation of people watching content to people who want to make content that people watch which is "their data" because it happened on "their device."
It makes me physically ill sometimes with how messed up this whole system came to be.
I also try to avoid being a panelist in behavior datasets. For this reason there are financial planning services I won't use and I won't buy a Vizio TV.
So, I'm very curious about your assertion that Roku is doing analytics for sale. I hadn't seen that before, so any further insight would be appreciated. Thanks.
Obviously, it's useful for advertising as well. But if they're not selling the data directly, it doesn't help with the content creation use case.
Google merges Chromecast and Android TV with the “Chromecast with Google TV”
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/google-merges-chrome...
My phone app (Movies & TV) updated to Google TV automatically.
I'm just kidding myself, theres no way itll work that cleanly.
For customers, it's essentially a chromecast + remote + new interface to choose apps (which is pretty generic)
The Google TV 10 years ago was rebranded as Android TV, so the Android TV reskin and slowmo rebrand is literally the linear successor.
(Of course, they are also rebranding Play Movies & TV on Android as Google TV, which makes me wonder what the Google Play Movies & TV app on Android TV is going to become Google TV on Google TV?)
Google's take on the TV app from Apple that runs on Apple TV, iOS, and Mac, serving as a common UI to content from apps that buy into the partner ecosystem.
Awkward how unclear that site is: this new app from Google is to be the UI pre-installed on future Android TVs, but for now, you can get as a thing running on a $49 Chromecast puck.
I bought this for the remote. There's not really anything to "improve" here. It's a dumb box that aggregates streaming apps.
The real differentiator is google assistant (and associated google home ecosystem - if you've bought into that)
What I'm not keen on is a cheap box that doesn't have enough RAM, so that it'll end up lagging. I don't understand why there isn't a premium model. I also don't want to dangle a weight from my HDMI port. That's probably how the HDMI ports broke on my last TV. I also would like to have volume buttons on the remotes. A mute button is nice but not enough. I'd rather trade the youtube and netflix buttons for real volume control buttons.
It looks like the remote has volume buttons on the right side by the way.
https://www.theverge.com/21495609/google-chromecast-2020-rev...
That’s good news on the remote though
It appears to be an aggregation service. Instead of individually searching across N platforms for content (hulu, disney+, youtube, crunchyroll, netflix, etc), you can now just use a single app (Google TV) which will allows you to search and stream across all platforms you are subscribed to.
Furthermore you can cast stuff directly to chromecast from Google TV as well as watch locally on your device.
(I genuinely thought it was still called Google TV so I was rather confused by this post - I couldn't work out what was new.)
The only aggregation on existing Android TV seems to be “Continue Watching” across apps.
Why should like me get such aggregation services that require 4 different subscriptions that add up to 600 Euro per year?
I never got these aggregation services - and there are already MANY of them. Here in Germany the Telcos are having setup boxes that are more powerful than this Google TV thing as they aggregate subscriptions AND are able to stream live TV via Cable. Just google Magenta TV and GIGA TV.
I have no issues with Amazon (or Netflix, which I don't use) knowing what I stream, but I do have an issue with Vodafone or Telekom knowing which TV channels I'm watching at what time.
That's why I prefer DVB-C.
The idea is sound: Let's use a common interface to all the content offered by the apps you already have installed.
But in practice (on Apple at least), it's awful. There's no telling whether you'll actually be able to view the content you see, or if it's just going to lead to some screen where you need to buy the content individually. Want to watch Family Guy? Oh it turns out YouTubeTV (your TV provider) has it but it's not donated to the AppleTV app, so you get a purchase link to buy an episode for $5, even though YouTubeTV actually has the same episode in your DVR library.
Want to watch the $sportsteam game that's on? Oh there's a link right there to watch it in the $sports_app app! Except that link takes you to a page that explains that you don't have the subscription necessary to actually watch the game. Or oops, it's blacked out in your area.
Or maybe you finally select something that's actually available to watch, so it links you out to the app that contains that content, only to have the app fail to support the appropriate intent/deep link, so you just end up on that app's home screen.
It ends up being this very hit-or-miss experience where anything you want to watch has like a 70% chance of actually succeeding, so you don't trust it, and it ends up being worthless.
Yes I'm bitter.
We need to reward companies that keep things alive for longer. I got an iPhone recently (over a somewhat cheaper Android) precisely because Apple provides OS updates for longer than any other smartphone maker. Sometimes over 5 years.
Especially as tech products have started to somewhat plateau in functionality, I value longevity over features or performance.
I already paid to own those songs. Why do I now have to pay a monthly subscription to keep using them?
Thanks but no thanks, Google.
They might be able to find a way to satisfy your wants? Maybe download them or similar?
You don't. You can download paid and uploaded content from Google Play Music and use it anywhere. This has been supported since before Play Music even had a paid subscription service.
Sure you can argue that the TOS said this or that when they bought the music.. but the fact remains: if they had bought the music on nearly any other music streaming service, they'd still have access to it easily on any device.
No, if they'd bought it on a wide number of other services, they'd also have had to switch to new services with different terms and features. Play Music isn't the only major store to have shut down over the years.
> Now they have a bunch of random mp3 files that can't easily be played on any device
Other than dedicated streaming devices, and devices that only handle dedicated physical media, pretty much any device that can play music can easily play mp3 files, random or not.
Also, the supported automated migration path (YouTube Music) does, in fact, play songs from the personal library ad-free without a subscription:
“You can play uploaded songs in the background on your mobile phone or on the web, ad-free and offline - even if you are not currently a YouTube Music Premium subscriber.”
https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/thread/52908732?hl=e...
So other than you have to click a button to migrate, and you have to use an app and service with a different name, there's no substantive change here.
I'm happy Apple TV (the device not the service) starts up with no ads. Android TV / Google TV is all ads (for shows). I managed to manually turn them off but now my is super ugly. You can't set a startup image or anything since it's reserved for ads. (well, short of writing my own launcher)
I don't know what I'm going to do for my next TV. I'd love to get a dumb TV but casually glancing through options it looks hard to find a dumb TV with high end features for a reasonable price. Most of the display oriented monitors seem to be 4x-10x the price and/or use 10yr old tech.
I literally stopped using Google Play Music for podcasts because that Adam Ruins Everything guy is always at the top of their recommendations. No problem with the guy or his content, just, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, seeing that guy, every time I switch podcasts, with no way not to see it.
Doesn't matter now anyway, Google Play Music is another service that lost the PM wars
Netflix chose to use recommendations as their first channel. Google TV acts as aggregator for those channels.
https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_google_tv_com...
It is laughable yet sad.
Then I was confused again- is this an actual TV? Oh it's a dongle- no, wait, that's a Chromecast with Google TV.
Anyway, I guess this is a new content app like Hulu.
Is my 65" TV I splashed out on going to stop getting updates now...
It honestly makes me angry how much human capital was wasted on making this. Everything about this is a UX nightmare, from the scrolljacking site, to the apps-in-apps UI, to the abomination of a remote. This is such a waste.
The software can still update. Does the hardware needed to play a video really become obsolete in 1 year? Why, do hardware decoders improve that fast? People aren’t using these panels for games
Unfortunately some devices don't support it, but I would guess most streaming sticks/boxes do.
Since the panel is expensive and the brains are cheap, it makes more sense to have them split.
Meanwhile I have a second-hand Apple TV and it's great, but if it weren't great I would keep my television and replace it with a Fire/Roku/Whatever device.
I suppose they could keep their smart TV and hook up a less shitty external device to do the smart things, but then the smart TV is just a dumb TV that takes 5x longer to boot and presumably wastes extra electricity in the process.
If I had any faith in these Android-based televisions to get long term software support and be at all reliable maybe it would be different, but based on track records in the ecosystem I absolutely don't. The life span of a television panel is many times as long as the effective useful period of an android device.
That's how it used to work about 20-15 years ago before flat panels become popular and still does to the some degree - at least in Poland. You had a CRT tv and DVB-S receiver and service providers were teasing all the time with revolutionary tech that will come soon and change our life; we were promised home banking, shopping, VOD, interactive channels and content, even Internet browsing with phone line used as upload channel.
Years later, we got a new flat tv and gave up on satellite tv as ISP finally upgraded infrastructure to FTTH from classic copper and it made sense to have all services in one cable and pay for it at single provider. The Samsung UHD ICU 100 receiver comes with ISP branded linux software that handles tv features like EPG, show recording etc., parental control, USB external storage playback, there are also 3 VOD choices - ISP own one, Netflix and HBO in separated "apps", weather and radio interactive channels (radio comes with predefined stations you can't change). You can check bill, change the tv plan (channels are handled by company that still operates with DVB-S; once it was possible to buy channels separately, now you gotta aim at full packet offer). There are "ads" - of shows from VOD services but nothing else; no idea if device pukes anything if you decide to not opt-out from tracking but so far, I'm satisfied. The smart tv itself become obsolete quite fast - applications doesn't load anymore, Netflix notoriously crashes upon launching, but with this receiver it's like it got a second chance.
Summing up, some ideas advertised become the reality but on a different medium - VOD, interactive channels and content is here, done by FTTH (and of course DVB - all comes what you need and what you can have, where do you live) but some stuff never arrived or become pointless to implement (Internet browsing, home banking and shopping).
How come nearly all video dongles want you to plug them into an HDMI port on your TV? Wouldn't it make more sense to plug them in to an HDMI port on your A/V receiver?
Unless you have a fairly recent TV and receiver, the TV can only send up to 5.1 DTS or Dolby compressed audio to the receiver, due to bandwidth limits of ARC. You need a system with eARC if you want to handle more, like Dolby Atmos, DTS-HD Master Audio, and the like, or uncompressed 5.1.
Also, with all video sources going through the receiver, it is one less remote to deal with. The only function you need on the TV is power on/power off, and one of your other remotes almost certainly will know or be able to be taught the TV's on/off code.
Another advantage of that approach is that you don't have a need, after initial setup, to look at any of the control or setting or information screens of your TV, which means if you've got a Smart TV that has started festooning those screes with ads, you don't see them.
I don't know if it's possible for the HDMI-CEC to pass through a receiver to the TV itself for this purpose.
Edit: Clarify it's the dongle
£59.99 = $77.45
$49.99 = £38.72
It's actually twice the price!
Its a Chromecast (4k60 HDR HDMI Dongle) that is running Android TV (Which they appear to be calling Google TV). And a remote control with voice controls. [1]
Not sure I see any reason why someone should get this over an Nvidia Shield. Which at least has a track record of long term support. Certainly a lower price point though, so maybe a market there?
[1] https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_google_tv_spe...
Maybe I'm just getting old lol
It would help if they would put some actual effort into the services behind Google Home/ Mini let alone Google Assistant before expanding hardware options.
Problem of course is that in practice Google nowadays is really about "organizing world's ads", so I am sure they will find more than one way to screw this up by insulting the intelligence of people using it.
Or is this a closed device, like a Chromecast?
It seems the whole TV viewing experience, both hardware and software is still mess, just like it was 10 years ago. I guess Steve [1] described it best, the lack of Go to Market Strategy.
I sometimes wonder why cant we build a Tuner that works on all International market.
https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/29/3704270/how-apple-can-bu...
There should be some law against Google launching products that invalidates existing products in their own lineup. Google PMs are high on adwords/adsense revenues trying to score points via product launches to get higher bonuses. That is an apt summary of Google's internal political economy.
Time to get an Apple TV and get off the Google ecoystem. sigh.
It's software that is included on the newest Chromecast. (And will soon be included in Android TVs.)
> What is the upgrade path from Chromecast.
It is included in the newest Chromecast, which is also the upgrade path for existing TVs that won't get it.
> There should be some law against Google launching products that invalidates existing products in their own lineup.
There should be a law against improved versions of existing products?
Something, something, cold dead hands.
Not the page’s fault (maybe), but it kept triggering reader mode on my phone multiple times as I scrolled down.
Um, well... coming from Google this is more of a turn-off, not a selling point.
(Hoax video from 2007 about how to get Google TV)
However, it would have to jump out of the TV and make me a bacon sandwich before I allowed Google to track what I was watching that evening.
Even then I would delete the app having ate the bacon sandwich.
Also, I agree, except the bacon sandwich is going to have to be a BLT, and it would have to bring me a Coke as well.
Every high-end TV today comes with some sort of OS pre-installed. So a set-top box in 2020 is not a very popular device. Even Apple figured it out and released Apple TV app on most smart TV platforms.
If they're going all in on remotes, then I need to move back to DLNA.
Would love if someone with more experience with Android TV could clarify though. I daily a Chromecast Ultra not Android TV.
I have a chromecast as well, and I really expected to use it over the built-in apps. But the built-in TV apps really blew me away, much better user interface than I was expecting. I'm hoping this new chromecast/Google TV thingy is as good, I'd really like to disable network connectivity to the TV if possible (but right now the apps are just too nice to give up).
> The Google Play Movies & TV app on Android mobile devices in the U.S. is now Google TV.
I'm not in U.S., though, so I guess no rebranding for me...
I think for 99% of people though this new Google dongle will do everything they need but cheaper.
* Google TV (A different product to this Google TV) * Nexus Q * Android TV * Youtube TV * Probably 10 other things that started and shut down without anyone noticing.
Client or client + server?
Movies and shows are grouped in ways that reflect your interests."
I can't be the only one who _wants_ to be surprised, out of their usual bubble of interest, at least sometimes.
How can one tell this to all these "clever" things?
I have firetv dongle(two of them) that can run youtube too.
Roku is also pretty popular in this space.
Some also uses apple tv(not an Apple fan here)
what google tv buy me? what's its unique selling point? that was not very clear to me.
Besides, a lot of these streaming sticks are cheaper that an RPi. The question is why should you use a Pi over the streaming stick, not the other way around.
Someone ran the photocopier on their competition.
- are they really that similar?
Maybe I'm looking at the wrong Apple TV screens - or they are an older version but Apple TV and Android TV look as similar to each other as either does to Google TV.
(Windows Media Center UI predates all three and was the first place I saw the "mix of horizontal and vertical" scrolling thing. It was a nice system for it's time)
TV is dying and few will miss or even notice it.
https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_google_tv_com...
That page is a bit better at explaining things.
The lack of that feature is my biggest gripe with the current dongle. The Cast protocol is a pain in the butt in terms of apps that support it.
I don't know about this device, but what you are describing is the antitheses of how chomecast is intended to work (or at least it was, from the beginning of chromecast to the last time I checked).
The idea is that you never stream anything from your phone, but rather your phone is a remote control and service authentication device for the chromecast.
Remember the old book/saying "Don't Make Me Think"? (Krug, 2000. Wow, it's 20 years old now?!)
This site made me think in ways that seem really unnecessary.
Serious question, why is this site designed like this, I honestly don't understand the goal here. It's like a slideshow? People in general are so interested in this they do actually page through it? I feel like it took some real effort to finally learn things that should've been on page 1.
My only problem is I've scrolled through the whole thing and I'm still not clear if Google TV is a website, a piece of hardware, a bundle of content, or what...?
It's clearly not just hardware because it says "Chromecast with Google TV". But then it definitely involves an app because it says "Use the app" and "Coming soon to smart TVs."
But I still am not exactly clear how it integrates with the streaming apps? In fact I have no idea whatsoever. Do I watch HBO and Netflix through Google TV? Or is Google TV just a glorified playlists app that lets me get recommendations across services, that then links out to watch them in separate apps? Is it a free app or a paid subscription service? Does it give me access to exclusive content? Or network TV?
I'm left with no idea why I would use this or not because I still don't know what it is.
Like watchlist in Search, the new Google TV app, and the launcher on this Chromecast.
(Disclosure: I work for Google, but I don't work on this)
If it doesn't get shutdown by Christmas its probably because they working out how to integrate it into Google Docs.
I also have several other screens that show the same entertainment services (with minor inexplicable differences).
Some are called "TVs", some are called "tablets", "laptops" or "phones" but they all seem to do roughly the same job in this regard.
(I also keep reading about a thing called a "notebook computer" but no human being I know has ever used that phrase. Is it different to a "laptop"?)
Some just 24/7 display live streams from YouTube of famous places.
TVs are cool. Television is garbage.
any chance you have a curated list of these you'd be willing to share? thank you
Besides the fact that many TV manufactures are owned by Chinese government subsidiaries, it's simply not safe to connect a TV to the internet. Who's collecting and selling the data? Why are they taking screen captures and sending them off to who-knows-where? Your TV spies on you[1].
Instead, my TV stays offline and I use an Apple TV. At least I know they're not selling my data to advertisers, and the experience is quite good.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/fbi-warns-about-snoopy-smart-t...