GoKawiilC. Scott Brown / Android Authority
A little over a year ago, I attempted to give up my Apple TV for the Google TV Streamer — hoping to immerse myself in Google’s smart TV OS and fully commit to it. However, just one week later, I was ready to go back.
The Google TV Streamer is a fine piece of hardware, but Google TV as a platform has rampant issues with bloatware, advertising, and sponsored content that desperately need to be fixed. Since I last toyed with Google TV, I’ve been waiting and hoping for Google to make meaningful changes here.
Unfortunately, looking at the latest big Google TV update that’s just rolled out, it’s blatantly obvious that Google doesn’t care about those things. Instead, it’d rather shove YouTube Shorts and generative AI down our throats. And if I didn’t already want to use Google TV, this just ensured I won’t try switching to it again anytime soon.
How would you grade the latest Google TV update? 7 votes A 0 % B 14 % C 14 % D 29 % F 43 %
What was Google thinking with this update?
One of the reasons I like the Apple TV so much is how clean and uncluttered its software is; the home screen simply shows rows of app icons for the streaming services I use. It’s perfect. Google TV, meanwhile, overloads its home screen with sponsored TV show and movie recommendations, restaurant advertisements, large sponsored sections, and more.
Rather than try to clean this up, the geniuses working on Google TV have decided to make the home screen experience even more distracting. Later this summer, Google will integrate YouTube Shorts into the UI.
They’ll appear under a new “Short videos for you” section, filling your Google TV home screen with YouTube Shorts videos you almost certainly don’t care about. And, in typical Google TV fashion, it doesn’t appear there will be any way to turn this off or disable it. Excellent stuff.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the other part of this update brings a whole lot of AI slop to Google TV. The Gemini tab is getting a new “Create” page where you can create AI-generated images with Nano Banana and videos using Veo.
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