C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
TL;DR An Android Authority teardown has revealed that Google TV could check if you’re still watching a channel.
Google TV would run these checks if you haven’t used your remote in a while.
The platform would then stop playing the channel if you don’t respond to the prompt.
Some streaming services, like Netflix, offer a pop-up to check if you’re still watching a series. This is especially handy if you’ve fallen asleep. Now, we’ve discovered that Google TV itself could get a similar prompt.
We dug into a recent version of the Google TV Home app for the Google TV platform (version 1.0.815784074-735113) and discovered the platform could soon check if you’re still watching TV. The strings mention a few snippets of text, seen below. Just checking in. This channel will stop playing because you haven’t used the remote in a while
Are you still watching?
Keep watching
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This is a pretty smart feature, although it’s unclear how long the platform will take to check in with you. The first text snippet above also mentions that the “channel will stop playing.” In other words, Google TV might not enter sleep mode immediately. However, the platform does dip into sleep mode after a while if you’re not playing any media or interacting with it. So it stands to reason that if your current channel stops playing via this new feature, your Google TV device will eventually go to sleep anyway.
Furthermore, the snippet’s reference to a “channel” suggests that this feature might not apply to all video content. But we’ll need to wait for more info to confirm this.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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