Google Needs an Apple TV (Premium)

I took another look at the inexpensive Chromecast with Google TV this past week and it’s still a bit underpowered for my tastes. In this case, you really do get what you pay for, but I’d like to pay more to get more. And that more should be in the form of a more powerful set-top box that resembles the Apple TV.

As a long-time fan and user of services like Gmail, Google Photos, Google Search, Google Maps, YouTube, YouTube Music, and the like, Google has long played a major role in my life, albeit one that’s been secondary to Microsoft for productivity and secondary to Amazon, Apple, Sonos, and other companies in entertainment and other forms of content consumption like reading. But 2023 was an interesting year for many reasons, among them that I’ve amped up my use of Google products and services in the past few months in ways that I didn’t see coming. I recently wrote about a major component of this shift in All-In on Pixel (Premium), but there’s more to it than that. This isn’t just about mobile devices and related hardware. More broadly, it’s about where I choose to spend my time for both work and play.

Ironically, this shift started in a year in which Google hasn’t always looked that great. In addition to stumbling badly, twice, in the face of Microsoft’s AI onslaught, the online giant is beset by antitrust issues here and abroad related to business practice abuses in the various markets it dominates. And Google even made my life harder by suddenly removing the extra paid storage feature that I relied on for my photos and document archives storage. (It was a lot like Google One but for managed Google Workspace accounts.) I wrote about that latter issue in Digital Decluttering: Online Accounts, Again (Premium).

But if there is a silver lining to that latter issue, it’s that it forced me to (at least partially) undergo the online account shift I had attempted back in September but then gave up on because of its difficulty: I had wanted to move my personal accounts and data—personal documents, Photos, YouTube, YouTube Music, and so on—from my Google Workspace account to my personal Gmail account but had kept running into roadblocks. And there are still roadblocks, as I still use my Workspace account for YouTube and YouTube Music. But my other data—personal and work documents and the archives, plus our photo collection in Google Photos—are completely moved over to Gmail, which now has a 2 TB Google One subscription attached to it.

The work documents bit was key among the surprises of the past few months: Thanks to the escalating enshittification of OneDrive in Windows 11, I moved to Google Drive. First tentatively, with a subset of my day-to-day work files, and then fully, as I moved over all of my work and work-related storage to Google Drive, including my books. I haven’t yet, but I could disable OneDrive in Windows 11 right now and get on with my life quite happily. (I won’t actually do that for a variety of reasons, but I would like to see whether Microsoft fixes the issues it’s caused and explore more workarounds as things change.)

This shift to Google Drive also opens the door to a possibility I’ve long considered and even felt was inevitable in time: Thanks to its seamless Drive integration and various platform improvements, including the addition of premium Plus models with the specifications and capabilities that power users demand, using a Chromebook regularly is suddenly getting realistic. I obviously have specific work-related requirements (and an innate interest in) Microsoft and its productivity offerings that curtail an immediate or total shift here. But … it would work otherwise. And is, I think, a tremendous option for many people thanks to the simplicity, security, manageability, and now the expanding capabilities of Chrome OS.

With all that as background, let’s consider the Google consumption experience.

YouTube is obviously a huge draw, and I also use YouTube Music for all kinds of reasons, including the ability to incorporate YouTube’s unique collection of music videos and live performances into my YouTube Music playlists as songs. And paying for Premium in one gives you Premium in the other, if that makes sense. In any event, I’ve been a YouTube/YouTube Music Premium subscriber for years, irrespective of the shift I’ve experienced over the past year or months.

This makes sense, given the diverse nature of video, in particular: Like many of you, we also subscribe to several other video streaming services, key among them Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Hulu, and Netflix, and these services are available everywhere, including Android and Google TV. But that’s just streaming video. We also use Plex to access a personal video collection over the network and Internet, which also work everywhere. And we have many (too many) purchased movies and TV shows, mostly in Apple’s ecosystem. That has long complicated things for me, and it goes against the advice I give to others, which is to make sure that whatever you buy digitally is accessible everywhere you want it.

That said, two things have improved the accessibility of this purchased content. The first is Movies Anywhere, obviously, which by my rough count means that I can access about 50 percent of my purchased movies from, well, anywhere. (Some movie studios do not participate in Movies Anywhere.) But more recently, Apple introduced its Apple TV+ service and app, first on its own platforms, but then later on streaming set-top boxes including, go figure, Google TV.

It’s not perfect. Ideally, Apple TV+, which lets me access my entire movie collection, would be available on Android as well, which would open it up to my Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel Tablet. And even if it were, Apple TV+ only gives you the basics on non-Apple platforms. So you don’t get the additional content from iTunes Extras, which I usually enjoy quite a bit. But again, much better than before.

I can’t solve the problem on mobile—the availability of most services sans Apple TV+ is good enough, I guess, if not ideal—but the availability of Apple TV+ on Google TV means that I could replace the Apple TV 4K we use in the living room as literally our only TV interface with a Google TV.

If only Google made a good one.

I was an early fan of the original Chromecast dongle and its successors—indeed, in our pre-Sonos days, we used several Chromecast Audio dongles on speaker sets to provide an early form of whole-house audio, and I still miss them—but I also acknowledged the glaring issue, especially for video content: You needed to use your phone to control playback and if the phone or doorbell rang or there was some other unexpected interruption, doing so easily and quickly was difficult. What this thing always needed was a dedicated remote.

Third parties provided Chromecast- and Google TV/Android TV-compatible set-top boxes that did provide a remote, of course, and we actually used a Xiaomi set-top box for a while for that reason. But in late 2020, Google finally work up to reality and released the Chromecast with Google TV. Excited by this development, I used one on our living room TV for a while—I even bought the Ethernet adapter for better performance—and it was timed nicely to the release of the Apple TV+ app.

Over time, however, performance issues cropped up, and it became clear that Google’s inexpensive device was perhaps too limited. Yes, you could add storage inefficiently by plugging in a USB hub, but what the device really needed was a beefier processor and more and/or expandable internal storage. And yet, here we are, over three years later and the only things that haven’t changed is that Google still sells this exact same device, unchanged, and it’s introduced an even cheaper version without 4K support.

But we don’t need cheaper. We need better. My Apple TV 4K, like my iPad Air, is not the latest model and it’s showing the strains of its age, slowing down and triggering anxious visits to various online stores to see whether a newer version is ever on sale. But I’ve also considered other options and come up short there too. Amazon has enshittified Fire TV with advertising (and more advertising). And Roku, which I don’t like, didn’t even upgrade its hardware this year. But given my Google shift this past year, I am of course thinking about what’s now called Google TV. And, of course, a newer and more powerful Chromecast with Google TV.

There’s no such thing. And I’m worried there won’t be: If you visit the Google Store online, there isn’t even an entertainment/TV option in the site’s menu, you have to navigate into Smart Home to find a category called Streaming. And there is only one option there, the Chromecast with Google TV, which comes in HD and 4K variants as before.

In the absence of an Apple TV-like, Google-made Google TV set-top box, I did search Amazon for such a thing. But the results are basically those two Chromecasts plus smart TVs with Google TV built-in, and if there is one thing I will never use, it’s a smart TV media app. (Let alone purchase a new TV just for that.) And the market for third-party Google TV set-top boxes is still as weird as ever. The top choice, perhaps, is the Nvidia Shield, which does support Dolby Atmos, Dolby Vision, and AI-powered video upscaling. And that’s about it.

I will continue experimenting with the Chromecast with Google TV I already have. But I would love to see a more capable Google TV set-top box. I’m curious this isn’t a thing.