Google TV will get subscription billing, support for movie and TV purchases in Google Play
While it didn't merit a spot in either keynote, the Google TV platform is also getting an updated version of the Google Play store. Along with a new UI that looks a lot like the one on other Android devices …
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands one day after Google Play opened for movie, TV and magazine sales on phones and tablets, and carries the same storefront onto the television with a UI that mirrors other Android devices. The telling detail is placement: Google kept the update out of both I/O keynotes, where Project Glass, Compute Engine and Chrome for iPhone and iPad took the stage.
The low-key rollout sits against commentary from the same week arguing Google has lost its way through nonsensical acquisitions and half-baked products — Google TV, off the main stage, is precisely the kind of effort that critique targets. Adding subscription billing alongside purchases also gives the platform a monetization story it lacked when it was mostly an app surface.
First-order effects
- Google TV owners gain direct access to Play's day-old catalog of movies, single episodes and full seasons, plus subscription billing, turning the set-top box into a transaction device rather than just an app launcher.
- Media sellers on Play reach the living room without building anything TV-specific, since the updated store reuses the interface already shipping on other Android devices.
Second-order effects
- Subscription billing puts Google between pay TV operators and their subscribers: any service sold through Play can reach the TV while Google owns the billing relationship and the customer data.
- Competing connected-TV platforms face pressure to match a purchase-plus-subscribe model on catalog and pricing, since Play's media inventory arrives pre-built from the phone and tablet side.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, TV hardware becomes a distribution endpoint for the same store serving phones and tablets, shifting Google TV's economics from OS licensing toward a cut of media transactions.
- It also widens the fork inside Android's device family — Google TV tracking its own Play builds even as Google pushes Jelly Bean-era fixes for fragmentation through earlier OS access for manufacturers — unless the storefront work folds back into one codebase.
The trend: Living-room platforms are converging with mobile app stores, turning televisions into checkout points for the same media catalogs sold on phones and tablets.