Google TV has to become better on 2024

Summary

Google TV has been under pressure to replace the Google Play Movies & TV app, which was discontinued in late 2023, with a well-designed new app that offers a high-quality service for watching movies and TV series. Google TV is a good hub platform for all your streaming services, whether you use a Smart TV or an external Chromecast dongle. It is an updated version of Android TV. Still, there are a few areas where the software may be improved, particularly in terms of user agency, convenience, and display.

To see for yourself how Google needs to enhance its offering, have a look at our list of the top five things that Google TV needs to fix.

1- Remove all of the superfluous adverts

They are detracting from the encounter.

The advertisements are now an issue with Google’s services that are almost iconic. It’s one thing to offer to remove adverts for a fee, much like YouTube, but when it comes to Google TV (and Android TV too), gradually and surreptitiously adding in ads that are progressively less relevant to the consumer is too much. Even with the outcry that Google’s choice to cram advertisements into Android TV caused, it’s almost humorous to realize how little the company has learnt from this mistake. Google even lacks the self-control to promote just the streaming services you really use. As a result of these unauthorized incursions, you may even see content from services you haven’t installed or subscribed to.

These obscenely aggressive advertisements, which often appear as soon as you boot up, are filled with tediously drawn-out films that relentlessly pitch you unneeded goods. To make matters worse, a large number of these Google TV advertisements promote tangible products like fast food, vehicles, and phones. No one bought a brand-new smart TV or brought a Chromecast so that someone might stick a large Carl’s Jr. logo under their nose. This is the epitome of Google’s ad problem: tasteless commercials that blatantly interrupt our TV viewing experience and cause unnecessary inconveniences.

Reducing the amount of advertisements on the Google TV interface completely would be a positive move. Google must also take into account the context of the advertisements it is promoting, since shoving advertisements for unrelated items inside Google TV makes them much more irritating and off-putting than before, particularly for those who have just spent hundreds of dollars on a new TV or streaming device.

2- Reprieve customisation on Google TV

Allow consumers to customize their app hub

The absence of customization choices on the Google TV panel is somewhat noticeable, particularly considering that Android TV—the service that Google TV is meant to replace—used to have a lot more customizing options (it even still has some). It’s shocking how much has been trimmed for Google TV, and it’s like night and day to compare the two customisation menus for each platform. The ability to add, move, and delete channel rows is lost for users, and the watch’s next channel is completely omitted. Many helpful dashboard elements have been deleted by Google; Android TV users aren’t as fortunate, and it’s already bad enough that you have to go into the settings menu to get the “Apps only” option, which disables personalized suggestions. No user wins in the end.

It’s evident that Google TV lacks the customizing options of Android TV, and it’s also clear that Android TV lacks an organized App Only mode. It seems that neither UI gets it quite right, which raises the issue of why Google is so opposed to user customisation in its TV interfaces—that is, unless the true motivation is to manipulate our behavior via social engineering rather than investing resources to provide us with the information we want.

3- Address the bothersome profile-switching problems

Improve the interoperability of Google TV’s applications

One of the most ridiculous issues with Google TV is that various Google accounts do not have their third-party account data adjusted. If you use a different email address to log into your Google TV app, for instance, you could discover that Netflix has not added you as a new user and won’t be changing. This means that if you just use the service for Netflix or Disney+, which require you to manually log out and back in with your preferred account every time, having several Google accounts becomes absolutely useless. This also affects dependable Google services, such as YouTube, which involves manual account change in order to function as intended. This is ridiculous, given how many gadgets manage that process so smoothly, notably TVs, which are widely recognized to be social spaces.

If this omission is not corrected, it might be very costly for Google TV since competing providers do not have this issue, and the frustrating lack of convenience goes against the purported goals of this streaming center. At the end of the day, Google, not third-party developers, is responsible for creating a flawless TV experience with Google TV. Feel free to point the finger at the app makers.

4-Redesign the user experience

A complete overhaul is required.

The user experience (UX) is the first basic that Google TV has to nail. Even on Android TV, the whole operation seems clumsy and unappealing, with unsightly, enormous icons taking up needless space, frequent slowness even with reliable connectivity, and a widespread over-reliance on glorified drop-down menus and fullscreen films that automatically play. These days, a streaming center has to be slick and streamlined to compete, and Google TV really cannot get away with requiring fifteen clicks to access fundamental functionality like the Google TV movies you’ve bought. Not only that, but other programs need various control methods, which is a perplexing issue in general UX design—that is, until you consider how often Google tries to push advertising in our faces. You see more adverts the longer it takes to browse a place. How handy for Google.

It is within the range of possible to make the Google TV interface a bit less difficult to read and use, and there’s a high probability that user input may make this happen. I won’t be holding my breath, of course, since Google would really have to care about the user experience rather than just how many advertising it can sling in our faces.

5- Give up promoting advertisements that pose as “recommendations.”

There’s no deceiving anybody with your wordplay; we all know these are adverts.

This last one may be a little more particular, but it highlights a major annoyance with the way Google TV presents suggestions. Three parameters are used by the app to determine the content suggestions that are shown prominently on the dashboard for users. Which shows Google TV will propose to you depends on the material that consumers actively interact with and the services they choose when signing up. But Google also sometimes inserts what seems to be random stuff that has never been requested or even recognized previously.

The choices are made automatically and cannot be changed by the user. It’s obvious that Google is using this feature to make it into a vehicle for selling more ads—no one is buying this as an effort to develop a useful and fascinating service. As’suggestions’ that you are obliged to accept and cannot withdraw and that you did not request are not recommendations. That is the worst form of advertisement, and anybody who knows what Google is doing will find it annoying.

It’s already unsettling enough that Google uses AI to figure out what we like to watch; adding more intrusive ads based on that data is just gravy. Google must maintain its suggestions’ relevance, modesty, and—above all—mutability. It doesn’t require any more advertisements than what Google TV already has, yet those are all we ever seem to receive.

Regardless matter how wonderful it finally becomes, Google TV is in a risky situation. It can sink or swim, and it’s now drowning in commercials. One must question whether this program will eventually join the Google tomb as well, as the only reason it’s even here is because Google lost trust in its predecessors.

In addition, a lot of user interest might be at stake due to Amazon’s recent ban of third-party launchers. Instead of continuing as is, cramming adverts into every available space and not making any progress toward better navigation, I would want to see Google TV thrive and provide customers with more reasons to stick with it. This puts it at danger of falling behind rivals, which is understandable.