Monday, April 7, 2014

Android TV Coming Soon From Google



Not content with millions of Chromecast dongle sales, a new report suggests that Google is preparing to take on the Apple TV, Roku range and newly-released Amazon Fire TV with a smart TV streaming platform of its own.

The Verge has unearthed details of a new television offering called Android TV, which looks like Google's most pointed charge towards the living room since its doomed Google TV platform. Described as an "entertainment interface, not a computing platform," by Google in the materials accompanying the screengrabs acquired by The Verge, Android TV is said to be "all about finding and enjoying content with the least amount of friction." It will be "cinematic, fun, fluid, and fast [...] optimised for the living room consumption experience on a TV screen."

Though the documents suggest search will be available, Google is apparently hoping to have that play a secondary role to its own predictive recommendation systems. Third party apps such as Netflix and games content is shown to sit side-by-side with Google's own first party video apps and YouTube, while the search giant's communication apps, such as Hangouts, are also present.

If all this is real, what's interesting is where this new platform will leave the massively-popular Chromecast dongle, and how the two will integrate, if at all. From a developer's point of view, the appeal of Chromecast had been that a secondary app need not be developed, but Android TV seems to suggest that manpower will have to be committed to the creation or porting of apps for a new platform.

I really hope this is real, it would look good on my 64 inch Samsung.

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