CES 2015: Google Android T.V will be available in this Spring

This spring, Sony, Sharp and TP Vision, with its range of Philips TVs, will start shipping televisions powered by Android TV. These have all the goodness of Android TV built-in so you won’t need to plug anything extra into your television. You can use a single remote to watch live TV channels and play games, movies or shows from Google Play and your apps.

These televisions feature voice search, to help you quickly find what you want, and they’re Google Cast Ready so you can cast your favorite entertainment from your phone or tablet to the big screen. Android TV will come to life on screens big and small, including brilliant 4K displays, thanks to the work of our partners.
If you want to get in on the action using your current television, Razer just announced a gaming console powered by Android TV. Razer’s Forge TV has high-performance specs, a wireless game controller and allows you to stream PC games to your TV. It will start shipping to consumers in February. Huawei is also working on an Android TV streaming media player that will be ready later this year.

When we launched Android with a single phone in 2008, we never imagined that we could connect over a billion people. And now, we're working closely with an entire ecosystem of TV partners  hardware manufacturers, service providers, and chip makers in order to reimagine the living room. All major television and TV device chip makers are participating: ARM, Broadcom, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Marvell, MediaTek, MStar, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and STMicroelectronics.

 

Google’s latest attempt to get its operating system for TVs embedded on consumer electronics devices has attracted a handful of partners, which were announced at the Consumer Electronics Show. In a blog post today, the search giant said TVs from Sony, Sharp and Philips would begin shipping soon. The company introduced the latest version of its smart TV operating system at Google I/O last June, and first made it available to consumers through the launch of its own Nexus Player late last year. But for Android TV to gain real market penetration, it would need some help.

That starts with bringing consumer electronics partners on board to create devices that had Android TV embedded in them. As is usual with these things, Android TV takes some pressure off device makers, since they won’t need to create their own operating systems for smart connected devices.

That’s why companies like TCL, Hisense, Haier and Best Buy’s Insignia brand are developing devices based on Roku’s operating system. This isn’t the first time Google has announced partners for a TV operating system. After all, it’s been working on this type of thing for the last four or five years.