LG Google TV Review
by Jason Inofuentes on October 2, 2012 9:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Google TV
- Media Streamer
- Media Player
- LG
- Honeycomb
- Android
- LG L9
- LG G2
Let’s talk a bit more about the Google TV experience. There are three components to Android, and every other operating system: platform, ecosystem, and access. Providing a structure within which developers can produce powerful applications is important. Ensuring an ecosystem within which users can find and purchase these apps is equally vital. Designing an elegant and intuitive solution for accessing these apps is the most user facing component, and so we spend a lot of time talking about it. In this case, LG has interjected their interface, for better or worse.
Android’s app platform has proven every bit the equal of the alternatives at producing excellent apps for smartphones. While expanding on the new features for Google TV and Honeycomb, several sessions at Google I/O 2011 were spent discussing how developers could use new UI design frameworks within the SDK to build apps whose UIs could extend to displays of all sizes. We’ve had two iterations of Android since then, and this design framework has been built upon; and yet here we are, and one of the most common complaints levied against Android tablets is that there aren’t nearly enough apps. And the same is true for Google TV.
In an age when rich apps are being produced with elegant UIs and immense functionality, too often the “apps” for Google TV are little more than links to a website. In medicine, there’s an old saying: “Salt follows water, and water follows salt.” There’s no need to expand on this particular analogy, but it can be revised to fit this scenario as, “Apps follow hardware, and hardware follows apps.” If there’s a rich selection of apps to be had, sales of hardware will flourish; if hardware sales are high, developers will flood that market with apps. Sales of Google TV hardware have been lagging since its inception. And app selection is poor. So, lose/lose there then.
So who does get it right? Five years before the first Google TV device was launched, Microsoft released a simple white box designed to play video games. Having made its way into millions of living rooms, Microsoft unleashed their plan to extend the function of their little white box to include all your entertainment needs. Truth be told, there’s no way that Microsoft could have known in 2005 that apps and streaming video would be all the rage today, but the Xbox 360’s capabilities were expanded and the result is arguably the most satisfying way to engage in streaming media. It’s not the multitasking app experience that you could expect from a modern operating system, and it’s certainly not perfect, but for a television UI and video experience I’d rather have easy to use and complete than complex and lacking.
We're not sure what's next for Google TV. It's been a year since version 2.0 rolled out, and Google has made nary a mention about the platform publicly. Their partners have released some hardware, including Vizio releasing a Marvell-based box, and Samsung will be joining the Google TV initiatives later this year with Smart TVs that offer Google TV services alongside their own content. Samsung's effort, like LG's, will not be vanilla Google TV. Rather, the Korean conglomerate will skin the software with its own UI, including its own take on motion controls (think Kinect, not Wii). I suspect this is an indication of what we'll see going forward, OEMs providing their own interface atop the core of Google TV.
That should all sound quite familiar and a bit worrisome. Skinning on Android handsets is a component in their fragmentation, something they surely would like to avoid with Google TV. Users will not tolerate discovering that a new app or service is unavailable on their two year old television when it's supported on the latest hardware. Whatever Google TV 3.0 and beyond look like, Google has promised that their core apps (YouTube, Search, TV & Movies, Play Store) will be updated on legacy hardware. This includes those based on x86 hardware. This mirrors what we see on Android elsewhere, as even Gingerbread devices are running the current iterations of Gmail and what not.
There's something else we should expect out of Google TV in the future. This year Google anounced an initiative to make YouTube a host to content portals, akin to the more traditional channel model of television. It's this sort of model that should be front and center on Google TV, but instead it's buried within the YouTube app. By elevating YouTube within Google TV, we could come closer to a more traditional television viewing model, but with web video. If you want to get a feel for what this could be like, try out Redux for Google TV.
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EnzoFX - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
No these solutions aren't revolutions, but isn't it all we need?A revue seems to be all I need. Skip the provider cable/sat boxes, and all you're left with is a pretty streamlined solution to stream online content. Sure it's all a lot of boxes due, but I like the fact that there's a much more direct support from Google themselves. It works. How often do some other boxes have issues with their own implementations of youtube or netflix, etc.
Is this not all we need? The app store is the real next hurdle, and it's bound to come, but until then, direct support for the basics, which even a power user must admit is 90% of what they would do with a TV is solid. This with the fact that it will trickle into your tv regardless is a nice icing on the cake for a sweet panel. Which if you think about the market, it's all about getting cheaper panels out.
Guspaz - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
The problem is that Google TV doesn't even seem to meet the existing requirements, let alone define anything revolutionary. Inability to play SD content properly? That's a pretty fundamental flaw. It sounds like, from the review, anything 16:9 should work fine in "full screen" mode, but anything 4:3 would not work with that (don't want it stretched out), so you end up with a tiny little 4:3 standard def window on a big screen... I don't understand how a media player can fail so utterly at something so basic.You don't even need an option here. It's video playback. Whatever resolution or aspect ratio it is, stretch it up so that it takes up as much of the screen as possible without cutting anything of. It's what every single video player on the market does, except apparently for this one...
JasonInofuentes - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
To be clear, that flaw, the awkward stretching of non-16:9 content, is only a problem in the "Media Player" app, which plays local content. Content streamed from the internet is almost always handled by the browser, or a provider's app, and those don't exhibit this behavior.jjj - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
Weird to see a review for a TV here.Anyway, the problem with TVs is that everybody thinks of them as TVs and not just screens. It shouldn't be about how we get media content or the UI or the remote or w/e other minor thing most think is the key,we'll manage when it comes to that and those are the easy things (that was me trying to make a point without giving away very specufic ideas ).
Google TV is just named wrong and missunderstood,it's about the internet on that screen,not about media content (even Google after a point went with the idea that it's about media).
JasonInofuentes - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
The thing is, if it were just about getting the internet on a TV then we should all have slim PC's hooked up to our TV's with wireless keyboards and mice. It's about changing the way content is found. Jeff provided a good description above of what an ideal for current content would be (instant streaming availability the moment a show airs) but that's only half the equation. For content creators and consumers alike, getting the right content to the right viewer is the holy grail. And if you have new content that appeals to people that like certain old content, or that meet some other demographic measure, then you could really score big by finding a way to connect the two. Google's solution was search as a user behavior and then related content as the connector. I search for content, and whether it's available or not, I am presented with a raft of other content that is available and relatable.Impulses - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
" Too many cooks stir the pot in the US television industry; and until someone manages to pare that down to a scant few, we’re not likely to get the on-demand, always ready, universal experience that this pastime has been aching for. "Could say the same for the mobile industry (and even the music industry), although it's greatly magnified with TV. I'm hardly a Jobs or Apple fan, but the impact that they had in wrestling some degree of control away from music studios and mobile carriers was huge, I'm not sure if anyone's ever gonna manage the same for TV & movies (Netflix's probably come closest before facing a ton of push back from studios).
Ten years from now we might remember those victories as Job's biggest impact, rather than the success of any one device... And we'll probably still be whining about cable/sat companies, studios, etc.
JasonInofuentes - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
+1antef - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
Thanks for writing this great review. Too often "reviews" on tech sites nowadays are just a run-down of the features you could get from looking at the product sheet without any real investigation, totally missing obvious pain points that a real user would see after just a few minutes. I want to hear about the actual experience of using a device, in a person's own words, like an Amazon review, and this article was spot-on. I liked hearing about some of the finer details of the platform since I haven't used it myself but have been wondering for some time if it would be a good fit for me. What I'd like to see is Google upgrade this to Jelly Bean and release a Nexus Google TV device for $99. It could have the potential to be the ultimate connected TV experience.JasonInofuentes - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
Thanks for the feedback.We'd heard rumblings of a "Nexus Google TV" for a while, and even the possibility that LG might be a partner in such a device. I think what we'll instead see is the disseminated experience I laid out. No longer will there be a vanilla Google TV experience, simply, the tools that make Google TV good will be made available to partners, and they're responsible for building the UI and fleshing out the experience.
This is kind of a smart bet. The Samsungs, Sonys and LGs of the world have been building TV's and TV UI's for ages, and love them or hate them, they do have the most experience with them. So, for Google to do all the guess work and try to build a UI themselves is risky, especially when you consider that people have always seen TV's as a long cycle product. Six month UI refreshes work fine on phone's since people swap phones every two years, or less. Same with tablets and other CE products. To a certain extent, even PC's (look at Apple's slow tweaking of OS X). But TV's have glacially moved from dials, to remotes, to on-screen menus, to the Smart TV era. If Google makes a bad bet on a UI and a partner doesn't care to update their product with a newer, better UI, Google ends up with egg on their face (see Android phones). Now, the $99 media box changes that equation pretty radically, but that's not where partners want to be. Margins on TVs and media equipment have gotten crazy thin, and Google TV works best as a content discovery service when it's fully integrated into the experience. So, a $99 box is a compromise for OEMs (super slim margins) and the user (multiple UI's layered atop each other).
antef - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
Thanks for the response. I would be disappointed if it played out as you predict, with Google TV's core parts just being offered to partners to integrate into products and create their own experiences with. That's essentially how the Android market works, with the exception that Google does provide Nexus "Google experience" devices, which I prefer to use. It's nice that Android exists for OEMs to create their own ecosystems out of, but I personally don't trust most of their work and would rather use the pure experience straight from Google. Imagine if you had no choice but MotoBlur, Sense, or TouchWiz on phones? That would suck.You give credit to Samsung's and LG's TV UI experience but I just don't see it. You pointed out yourself all the strangeness with LG's UI on this TV. Samsung just throws everything at the wall to see what sticks. Their TouchWiz UIs are the least elegant Android skin out there, and now with their new TVs they're trying voice, motion sensing, everything. An integrated experience from a company like this will always be a bad experience. Too much ads, and worse, too much of their own content and stores being shoved down our throat. It will never look like a cohesive solution, leaving the door wide open for Apple to come in and do it better.
The $99 box should be EXTREMELY appealing for Google, for the same reason Android is appealing to them: getting more people searching the web and seeing ads. TV is a huge untapped market with lots of people not currently in the smartphone-owning demographic. Google should get hardware into these people's hands as cheaply as possible to get them searching Google, using Chrome, etc. from their couches. The $99 box is also a win for consumers as it lets them swap it out whenever technology advances independently from their TV.
If a Nexus Google TV device doesn't happen I will probably seek out the closest to stock experience at the same price point from a partner.