Google TV

» see google.com/tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Google TV was a United States product at the licensing layer, whatever the box said on the outside. Its whole argument was that your television should be able to open the same websites your computer could, and the websites it had in mind were American network sites streaming American shows under American rights deals. Announced at Google I/O on 20 May 2010 and shipping that October, it was a platform whose value depended entirely on which country's address you came in from.

The first wave was two devices. Logitech's Revue was a 299 dollar set-top box with a full keyboard meant to sit in your lap. Sony built the platform directly into a 24-inch television, the NSX-24GT1, at around 600 dollars, and into a Blu-ray player besides. Underneath both was an Intel Atom CE4100 running Android with a full Chrome browser and Flash, which in 2010 was not a small claim. The actual web, on the actual television, with a keyboard.

Then the networks read the user agent string. One after another they returned a blank page to anything identifying itself as Google TV: NBC, ABC, Fox and CBS cut it off from their own web video, Hulu did the same, and Viacom followed. The objection was contractual. Their deals were written per country and per device class, and a browser on a television made both of those categories stop meaning anything. So they closed the door and kept it closed for the product's entire life.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the second wave ~

Google did not quit after the first year. The platform moved off Intel and onto ARM in 2012, rebuilt on a newer Android, and picked up hardware from LG, Vizio, Hisense and Asus. By October 2013 there were roughly a million Google TV devices in active use worldwide. For a category Google intended to own, a million is not a foothold. It is a rounding error with a support burden attached.

The hardware partners had already priced in the outcome. Logitech cut the Revue from 299 dollars to 99 in July 2011 and took a 34 million dollar charge, and by that November the chairman Guerrino De Luca was describing the launch in public as a mistake of implementation of a gigantic nature. At one point dealers were returning more units than they were selling. Nobody was going to sign up for a second round after watching that.

~ the handover ~

At I/O on 25 June 2014 Google announced Android TV, and that was the end of Google TV as a live platform. The SDK came down, which meant no new software could be built for the devices people already owned, and the existing installs were left to age out on whatever firmware they had. There was no migration path and no attempt at one. The 2010 hardware was simply orphaned where it stood.

~ borrowed back in 2020 ~

In 2020 Google put the name on the Chromecast interface, and it now sits on televisions from a dozen manufacturers. Nothing survived the gap except the three words. The current Google TV is a recommendation shelf over licensed streaming apps, each one negotiated with the same companies that blocked the original. The 2010 version tried to route around those companies with a web browser and learned, over four years, exactly how much of television is a legal document rather than a signal.

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