GoKawiilJoe Maring / Android Authority
Doomscrolling is a concept we are all very well-acquainted with. Netflix might have a seemingly endless list of movies to offer, but actually finding one that you want to watch always feels completely out of reach. All too often, I find myself sitting on the couch, remote in hand, trying to figure out what to watch while the evening wastes away. The paradox of modern streaming is that the more choices we have, the harder it becomes to settle on anything, turning what should be a relaxing evening into a tedious exercise in decision paralysis. Me? I usually end up on YouTube. But I digress.
After spending a week letting a chatbot dictate my evening TV watching, I'm convinced this is the future of streaming on Google TV.
Recently, I was pitched an interesting solution to exactly this discovery problem by Indian hardware upstart, Lumio. Dubbed Project Neo, it is an experimental AI agent designed to bridge the gap between the devices we use to discover content and the screen we watch it on. And the best part is that it does this using apps you use every day.
By connecting an AI agent directly to your Google TV through WhatsApp and Instagram, Project Neo promises to take the friction out of the living room entertainment equation. After spending a week letting a chatbot dictate my evening viewing habits, I am convinced that this approach to content discovery is exactly what the smart TV ecosystem has been missing. More than that, though, it might be one of the smartest use cases of AI I’ve come across recently.
How do you pick out what to watch? 24 votes I scroll through streaming apps. 67 % I ask friends or social platforms. 21 % I search Google. 13 % I let AI tools make the choice for me. 0 %
Smart TVs still don’t understand what you want to watch
Joe Maring / Android Authority
The biggest flaw with modern smart TV platforms is that content discovery is broken. The second biggest flaw is that it is still largely genre-dependent. There’s a lack of nuance and understanding that a masterful horror movie like Midsommar has more in common with the British classic The Wicker Man and less so with whatever schlock horror Netflix is peddling today.
Streaming interfaces are designed to maximize engagement time, and users are expected to browse dense grids of promotional tiles, watch auto-playing trailers that we did not ask for, or scroll through multiple menus using a remote that hasn’t changed much over the last few decades. This ignores the fact that discovery happens on our smartphones, through forums like Reddit, and social platforms like Instagram.
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