Android TV

Android TV is a smart TV operating system based on Android and developed by Google for television sets, digital media players, set-top boxes, and soundbars. A successor to Google TV, it features a user interface designed around content discovery and voice search, content aggregation from various media apps and services, and integration with other recent Google technologies such as Assistant, Cast, and Knowledge Graph. The platform was first unveiled in June 2014, and was first made available on the Nexus Player that November. The platform has been adopted as smart TV middleware by companies such as Sony and Sharp, while Android TV products have also been adopted as set-top boxes by a number of IPTV television providers. A special edition, called Android TV "Operator Tier", is provided to pay television and other service operators that implement Android TV on the device they provide to their subscribers to access media content. In this edition, the operator can customize the home screen and services on the device. This certification streamlines UI management, app launches, and content delivery, empowering operators to deliver unique experiences on Android TV. Android TV was first announced at Google I/O in June 2014, as a successor to the commercially unsuccessful Google TV. The Verge characterized it as being more in line with other digital media player platforms, but leveraging Google's Knowledge Graph project; Chromecast compatibility; a larger emphasis on search; closer ties to the Android ecosystem (including Google Play Store and integration with other Android families such as Android Wear); and native support for video games, Bluetooth gamepads, and the Google Play Games framework. Some attendees received the platform's development kit, the ADT-1; The Information reported that the ADT-1 was based on a scrapped "Nexus TV" launch device that was being developed internally by Google. Google unveiled the first Android TV device, the Nexus Player developed by Asus, at a hardware event in October 2014.