Google TV is taking another step in its acquisition of Google Play Movies. The app rolls out to iOS on Wednesday, where it’s an on-site upgrade to Google Play Movies & TV. As announced in March, Play Movies & TV is also losing its place in the Play Store on Android this week, where it was a top-level tab. There is now not much left of Play Movies & TV or Google’s original ambitions for the Play brand.
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We can talk about the new one first: the Google TV app is out on iOS. On Android, the app is partly a media store and partly a content aggregation guide. You may have noticed that there is a lot of streaming services. Google TV is a kind of modern TV guide that tells you which apps are playing on which apps, and that feature makes the leap to iOS. Google says iOS users can “take your library on the go,” but only for “movies and shows you’ve previously rented or purchased with your Google Account.” So it sounds like the store part of Google TV is not doing well. If you need to run the Android TV or Google TV operating systems on your TV, you can also now use your iOS device as a remote control.
Google also finally went ahead with its plan to remove video purchases from the Play Store this week, making Google TV (well yes, and YouTube, I think) the primary way to buy video content from Google on Android. Google Play was originally conceived as an all-encompassing media empire, covering Google Play Music, Google Play Magazines / Newsstand, Google Play Movies and TV and Google Play Books, all sold in the Google Play Store. Play Store comes as the default app store on all 3 billion Android devices in the world (“Android” is a registered trademark of Google and does not include forks). Clothing Google’s high-traffic app store with a number of media content stores seemed (and still works) a solid strategy.
However, Google can not hold on to it and turned what is left of these media stores into independent properties. Newsstand / Magazines was shut down in favor of Google News in 2018. Google Music was tragically shut down for YouTube Music in 2020. Play Movies has been on its way out the door since Google TV’s launch in 2020, and now Play Store only sells the awkward combination of apps and books.
Play Movies & TV will not be as clean of a death knell as other Google Play brands. Contrary to the name, Google TV also handles movie tasks on some platforms, but so does YouTube, and Play Movies still exists for some platforms and countries. Google has a support page that describes its absolutely non-dysfunctional video app program, which shows which of its three competing brands are available on specific platforms. Phones apparently still have YouTube, Play Movies & TV, and Google TV, depending on your country. On the web, you can still choose from Google Play or YouTube. Smart TVs are super-complicated: On third-party platforms like Roku, you need to use the YouTube app. Google does not provide a Google TV app for Android TV; instead, still use the Play Movies & TV app. Google has a new branch of Android TV, also called “Google TV” (this is an entire operating system), which integrates Google TV the service into the operating system. That kind of explains why Android TV does not have a Google TV app.
Unilaterally replacing everything with Google’s most powerful media content brand – YouTube – would make the most sense, but rights negotiations would complicate it. Google Play Movies & TV offers purchases in 117 countries, while YouTube has only entered into purchase agreements in 46 countries. There is also already a service called “YouTube TV”, but it is a replacement for cable TV.