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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 include A24 and Lionsgate, with Lady Bird, 17 Again and Hell's Kitchen among the titles up right now, and Google says the library will rotate through the year. The live side grew too, past 300 channels, with Bloomberg TV+, Yahoo Sports Network, The Martha Stewart Channel and World of Love Island among the additions.
Worth saying plainly: Google is late here, not first. Tubi, Pluto and the Roku Channel have all had free on-demand catalogues for years, and Tubi alone claims a horror section bigger than some paid services. What Google has that they don't is placement. Freeplay sits inside the Google TV home screen on every one of these devices, so it doesn't have to win an app download, it just has to be one row down from the thing you were already looking for.
The catch is the one at the bottom of the announcement. US only, on Google TV devices. If you're outside the States that row either isn't there or shows you a fraction of it, and given how much of the Google TV home screen is already promotional space, non-US owners are giving up the shelf area without getting the catalogue.
The rotating library also cuts both ways. Titles arriving means titles leaving, and none of these free services tell you what's about to go. Has anyone in the US actually opened it yet? Curious whether the on-demand encodes are better than the live channels, which look pretty rough on anything over 65 inches.
Worth saying plainly: Google is late here, not first. Tubi, Pluto and the Roku Channel have all had free on-demand catalogues for years, and Tubi alone claims a horror section bigger than some paid services. What Google has that they don't is placement. Freeplay sits inside the Google TV home screen on every one of these devices, so it doesn't have to win an app download, it just has to be one row down from the thing you were already looking for.
The catch is the one at the bottom of the announcement. US only, on Google TV devices. If you're outside the States that row either isn't there or shows you a fraction of it, and given how much of the Google TV home screen is already promotional space, non-US owners are giving up the shelf area without getting the catalogue.
The rotating library also cuts both ways. Titles arriving means titles leaving, and none of these free services tell you what's about to go. Has anyone in the US actually opened it yet? Curious whether the on-demand encodes are better than the live channels, which look pretty rough on anything over 65 inches.
