Android TV hands-on: Google makes a new play for the living room
Google hasn't exactly been successful at taking over the living room — Chromecast aside, its previous efforts have failed to capture much consumer interest. However, during the I/O 2014 keynote today …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is Google's third run at the television. Google TV was barely mentioned at I/O 2013, a quiet acknowledgment that the first effort had failed, while the $35 Chromecast dongle became the company's only living-room hit by doing almost nothing. The strategy since has been two-track: keep the cheap cast-only device, and rebuild the full smart-TV platform on top of Android rather than the old Google TV software.
The groundwork was laid two months ago, when April's leak revealed Android TV as a simple set-top interface for movies, shows, apps, and games, followed by Gigaom's look at how Google wants to reinvent apps for the living room. Today's I/O 2014 keynote makes it official, and the syndicated coverage shows the platform pitch landing broadly — including word that Razer is building an Android TV gaming 'micro-console' for this fall.
First-order effects
- TV makers and hardware partners now have a standardized Android platform to build against — Razer's fall micro-console is the first concrete commitment — instead of each vendor shipping its own half-baked smart-TV stack.
- Android developers gain a direct path to the television screen, extending the Play ecosystem beyond phones and tablets into the living room.
Second-order effects
- Roku, Apple, and Amazon face a rival whose distribution lever is the same app economy that reshaped mobile — their closed content-box models now compete with an open platform backed by thousands of existing Android developers.
- Chromecast's role shifts from standalone product to complement: the syndicated reports of new casting features, mirroring, and 'Backdrop' slideshows suggest Google will keep the $35 dongle as the low-end entry point feeding users into the fuller Android TV experience.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the living-room interface war stops being about channel guides and hardware boxes and becomes an extension of the mobile OS duopoly, with televisions converging on Android or iOS-derived platforms.
- A failed-then-relaunched pattern also raises the bar for what counts as a credible TV platform: content partners and chipmakers increasingly wait for a mobile-scale developer ecosystem before committing to any smart-TV standard.
The trend: Television platforms are being rebuilt on mobile operating systems, as Google trades the failed Google TV approach for an Android-based app ecosystem aimed at displacing proprietary smart-TV stacks.