billbixbyakahulk
New member
Google TV is rolling out a batch of new features and the coverage has all been about the AI toys. You can talk to your TV and have Nano Banana rewrite a family photo, or have Veo generate a short video from a prompt, both accessed through the Gemini tab under Create. Google's own example is asking it to make your grandfather moonwalk in space. Both land first on Gemini-enabled TCL Google TVs in the US. There is also voice search across your Google Photos library, which pulls up a browsable results page you can open full screen or run as a slideshow.
I cannot get excited about generating images on a television. It is a shared screen with a remote control as the input device, which is close to the worst possible tool for anything creative. Everyone in the room has a phone that does this better and faster. The Photos search I will grant is useful, because finding a specific holiday on the big screen has always been miserable.
The line that actually matters is buried at the end: a new row of short videos is coming to the home screen. That is not a feature, that is an inventory change. The Google TV home screen has been steadily colonised by rows nobody asked for, and a scrolling short-form feed is the most engagement-optimised surface anyone has ever put in a living room. Once it is there, it will not be removable, and everything else on that screen gets pushed a row further down.
I have been using a Google TV Streamer as my main box precisely because the platform was less obnoxious than the alternatives. Genuine question for people running Fire TV or a Shield alongside: is anyone still on a launcher that has not gone this way, or is that fight simply over?
I cannot get excited about generating images on a television. It is a shared screen with a remote control as the input device, which is close to the worst possible tool for anything creative. Everyone in the room has a phone that does this better and faster. The Photos search I will grant is useful, because finding a specific holiday on the big screen has always been miserable.
The line that actually matters is buried at the end: a new row of short videos is coming to the home screen. That is not a feature, that is an inventory change. The Google TV home screen has been steadily colonised by rows nobody asked for, and a scrolling short-form feed is the most engagement-optimised surface anyone has ever put in a living room. Once it is there, it will not be removable, and everything else on that screen gets pushed a row further down.
I have been using a Google TV Streamer as my main box precisely because the platform was less obnoxious than the alternatives. Genuine question for people running Fire TV or a Shield alongside: is anyone still on a launcher that has not gone this way, or is that fight simply over?
