Back then, "Google TV" was its whole own OS initiative. This was years before Android TV was a thing. But Google TV had far less wide-ranging industry support than Android TV has today. And Google TV needed industry support, because it was literally just an OS platform (like Android TV) rather than something Google was able to push by shipping its own hardware. No third parties interested in integrating the platform? No point.
This go-around, "Google TV" seems to be just some first-party Chromecast hardware running an OEM skin over Android TV OS. Much lower CapEx. Far easier to justify as a Google project.
(And it's a logical strategic move, too. A lot of smart TV manufacturers are shipping crap Android TV implementations that plaster advertising everywhere; and the advice everyone gives to get around that is to get an Apple TV, because Apple's tvOS doesn't force ads on you. That gives the Apple ecosystem a foothold in otherwise-Google-ecosystem homes and businesses. Google is likely willing to spend a lot of money to prevent Apple getting that foothold.)
As long as Google makes its money selling ads every one of their services is just one lousy executive seeking "synergies with the ad business" away from ruining the experience.
Combing both Chromecast and Android TV (e.g. Nvidia Shield) has a less than 10% market share.
Making it smaller than Samsung, Amazon, and much smaller than Roku (market leader). It seems to have a hardcore audience that think the world of it (or who haven't tried anything else), but most of the market moved on years ago.
If anything this Google TV "Chromecast" is designed to make Chromecast relevant again.
> If anything this Google TV "Chromecast" is designed to make Chromecast relevant again.
Chromecast has always had the issue that it's main users are the tech savvy who are comfortable controlling everything via smartphone. That's not a huge percent of the population.
By adding the remote and going for the play of helping you navigate cross app, they seem to be trying to extend out to less savvy users who need a more guided product.
Overall it seems like the longterm plan is to push their subscription services, since I can't imagine they make great money from the devices themselves. Increasing user base is the best way for them to achieve that goal.
Worth asking where the gesture & other potential touchless interface experiments are. Project Soli was supposed to be the high tech radar option to let one gesture above a phone to control things, but just picking it up & using it like a wand would be not-hard to experiment with.
I'd consider how much software adoption there is for Google Cast (nee Chromecast). A good number of web pages have dedicated cast support (better than browser's built in support), for ex Spotify. Most podcast & audio apps on Android have Cast support (pocketcast, spotify, &c).
While there may be more appliances out there, & some popular ones, they are kind off all off on their own with some random native apps cobbled together out of whatever random sdk the hardware has. The apps almost never coordinate very well with your phone.
Cast is absolutely dominating. Playing a far better game than everyone else. Easy for developers to work with (so easy with the web platform support being built in). Software adoption within a web page makes all the sense & is so easy & flexible. We haven't even seen multi-phone "multiplayer" cast apps get popular but it's easy to do. No one else can compete.
Please let OpenScreenProtocol start getting some traction so we can continue advancing these capabilities & start freely building systems that can work together.
They're distinct ecosystems though because Android TV/Chromecast use the Play Store for content/app delivery, whereas Fire TV/Samsung/Roku use their own respective stores.
If one supported both the Play Store and their own, the definitions might be more subject to question, but as it stands they don't officially allow that.
To create their own distinct ecosystem, which is what we're discussing.
Pointing out both Android TV and Amazon Fire is Android OS based isn't particularly relevant to market mineshare. Linux too is used by both (and others), but it would be pretty strange to try to combine them all under a "Linux streaming stick" moniker.
I'm not believing it. Those folks are using Android boxes, but they're not from Google.
I'm sure someone followed instructions they found on Medium and want to show it off to their friends. That's fine. Those aren't the majority of users though.
For half the price of a Chromecast, Android STBs are the 'hit'.
most of my friends are not into tech, yet they all own chromecast for exactly the reasons I cited. your milage may vary, but you have no reason not to believe it.
No clue, I'm on a Mac and no knowledge of Nvidia Shield. Plex is great for a lot of things but it's not perfect, has a lot of format support issues, and isn't as direct and fast as choosing a Chromecast Renderer in VLC
At least in China, so many TVs and projectors and set top boxes use Android under the hood, but they are so heavily customized it’s sometimes hard to tell. And it’s definitely not standard “Android TV“
Except for Reader, Inbox, Cloud Print, the Nest API, Code, among many others I'm sure. It doesn't seem to matter whether they're successful or popular.
I was a big reader person, but google is victim of its own success. These products were barely above a few million users. At google scale,1% is more than 15m person, and usually 1% is not justifiable
Huh? If Google didn't want to charge a fee for use (which doesn't seem to be how Google works), then they could easily have inserted their own adds into the RSS feeds. Or had an ad bar in the Reader interface.
It seems like Google of all places would have been able to figure out how to support that with ads.
I just don't think that they wanted to. It didn't fit into how they thought people would be interacting with the Internet in the future, and I can't say they were all that wrong...
This go-around, "Google TV" seems to be just some first-party Chromecast hardware running an OEM skin over Android TV OS. Much lower CapEx. Far easier to justify as a Google project.
(And it's a logical strategic move, too. A lot of smart TV manufacturers are shipping crap Android TV implementations that plaster advertising everywhere; and the advice everyone gives to get around that is to get an Apple TV, because Apple's tvOS doesn't force ads on you. That gives the Apple ecosystem a foothold in otherwise-Google-ecosystem homes and businesses. Google is likely willing to spend a lot of money to prevent Apple getting that foothold.)