google tv

I ran a projector in a room with two south-facing windows for about three years and learned the hard way that lumens are not what fixes daylight viewing. Black level is. So when the Nebula X1S turns up claiming 6,000 ANSI lumens and gets written up as watching movies outside in broad daylight...

Saw someone laying out a full remodel, 77 inch C5, Onkyo N6100, Klipsch 800s up front, 500SAIIs doing Atmos and rears, RP-504CII centre, R-121SW underneath, and then agonising over which streaming box to put in front of it. If you have already spent that, the box is the cheapest decision on the...

Your gear list answers half of this already. A 77-inch C5, an Onkyo doing the decoding, Klipsch 800s up front with the 500SAIIs pulling double duty for heights and rears, and a 12-inch sub. That is a system that will show you the difference between a good handoff and a bad one, so the question...

The number that stopped me in this review isn't the price, it's the color accuracy. Digital Trends measured the QM7L at Delta E 2.6 in Filmmaker Mode at 100 nits with processing off. Last year's QM7K measured 0.8 in the same slot. Under 1.0 is the point where your eye stops being able to find...

Freeplay has been the live channel grid built into Google TV for a while now, and Google has just bolted video on demand onto it for the first time. More than 10,000 movies and shows you can start whenever you want, ad supported, no separate app to install and no subscription. Studios named...

What Hi-Fi has put up a phone-to-TV guide and the useful part is the distinction most people never get told. Casting hands the job to the TV, which then streams the content itself while your phone acts as a remote, so you can leave the app, take a call or switch the screen off and playback keeps...

Freeplay quietly turned into something else this week. It launched as a channel grid, the free live stuff baked into Google TV sets and the Walmart Onn boxes, and Google has now dropped a library of more than 10,000 free movies and shows into it, along with another 300 or so live channels. The...

Epson has said select Lifestudio projectors running MediaTek's smart platform will pick up Google TV with Gemini through a firmware update, with the Lifestudio Grand first in the coming months and other models following through 2026. The pitch is conversational search instead of menu diving, one...

9to5Google flagged some new data putting Google TV and Android TV together in third place among streaming platforms in the States. I can't get the full piece to load and I haven't seen the underlying methodology, so treat the ranking as a headline rather than a fact for now. But the claim itself...

Went back through Google's design writeup on the TV Streamer, the one where Ivy Ross and Isabelle Olsson walk through the decisions, and one line explains the whole shape of the thing. Olsson says they were bringing it out from behind the television set, so it needed to be something people are...

July 24 marked thirteen years since the original Chromecast landed, which sent me rummaging for mine. Thirty five dollars, a stick about the size of a USB drive, micro-USB for power, 1080p ceiling, and no remote at all - your phone was the remote. That last part was the actual idea, and it is...

Google put out its Best of 2025 list for Google TV. Most watched among films new to streaming that year were Superman, Sinners and The Pickup, which Google describes as a heist comedy. On the show side it was Reacher, The Last of Us and Love Island USA. The collection lives under the For You...

Google TV Freeplay keeps growing and I still can't work out who it's for. The additions Google called out most recently are an SNL Vault channel, a Real Housewives Vault channel and American Ninja Warrior, all running live and free around the clock. The vault format is the odd part. You have an...

The other half of Google's CES pitch for Google TV is generative work running on the television itself. Gemini searching your Google Photos library for a specific person or moment, Photos Remix applying artistic styles to your pictures, memories turned into what Google calls cinematic immersive...

Google is bolting sports briefs onto Gemini on Google TV. The pitch is narrated catch-up on whatever league you follow, starting with the NBA, NCAA basketball, NHL, MLB, MLS and NWSL, sitting in the Gemini tab on the home screen. It builds on the news briefs they added last year, and it landed...

Google has been listing smart projectors from Vankyo, Epson and XGIMI alongside its TVs as Google TV devices, and that is the corner of the projector market I have been waiting to shake out. For years the app situation was the whole problem: some Android build nobody supported, a store full of...

Have tried a few smart home dashboards and the one that stuck is the least ambitious: the home panel on Google TV. It sits on the TV, shows the compatible lights, thermostats and cameras, and that is roughly it. The reason it wins is location. A dashboard on a phone means finding the phone...

The Streamer has been under the TV since launch and the two features I use daily are the boring ones. Not the Gemini summaries, not the curated rows, but the programmable button on the remote and Find My Remote. That extra button can be pointed at the home panel, a specific app, or another...

Went digging after seeing a piece on where the default Google TV ambient photos come from, and the answer is funnier than I expected: most of them are shot by Google employees. The team leaned on a stock image marketplace early on, then from 2020 started asking Googlers to submit their own work...

Setting up a new TV is the worst half hour of owning one, so I paid this more attention than it probably deserves. Google reworked the Google TV out of box flow and handed it to Hisense first, on the 2025 U7 and U8 series, before pushing it to other Google TV devices and some of Walmart's onn...