Google's ambitions for taking over your TV extend beyond the quick and cheap Chromecast, as leaked documents obtained by The Verge show. A major revamp of the company's streaming media platform, called Android TV, appears to be headed our way.
The screenshots show a vibrant visual interface not unlike that found on Netflix, Roku and Amazon's new Fire TV. You'll control it with a normal remote or app, but it will also connect to your phone, tablet and PC — letting you pick up watching a show you started while riding the bus, for example.
Simplicity and quickness are reportedly the goals, according to the Google documents: New and favorite content should never be more than a few taps away. And while you can install apps like Netflix and Pandora on the device, the focus seems to be on getting straight to what you want to see, not browsing through lists.
Interestingly, there is already a device called Android TV: a rather anonymous gadget that offers similar capabilities to other set-top devices, but isn't associated with Google.
It's not clear from the documents whether Google's upcoming Android TV will be a physical device, an OS for smart TVs, or, as with Google TV, both. Android head Sundar Pichai hinted last year that the Chromecast was only the first of two or more TV devices, but whether Google will make its own hardware or simply offer the software to partners is unknown.
