The 4 upcoming Google TV updates that’ll make a big difference on my TV

Google recently hosted the 2025 edition of its annual I/O conference, and as usual, the focus was on

Gemini
and

Android
, with everything else taking a backseat. But it did have a set of important

Google TV
changes to reveal, which is rare — usually, the company is content with slow evolution on the platform. Presumably the tech doesn’t generate nearly as much revenue as phones and Google One subscriptions.

Some of these changes, coming later in 2025, could have a significant impact on my home viewing experience. I’m not the most rabid

cinephile
, but I do care enough about movies and TV shows that I’m planning to update my TV as soon as these features come down the pipe.

Watching things the way they were intended

A24

One of the biggest headaches of caring about movies and TV is calibration. When I got my Hisense U6K last year, I spent at least 15 to 30 minutes tweaking picture settings to get things just right. “Right” is a relative term, however — while it’s possible to pick settings that look good in most situations, you’ll inevitably run into a video that’s too bright, too dark, or too warm, never things like contrast or the perpetual motion smoothing controversy. Many people probably don’t even understand all the options available to them.

The Media Quality Manager should solve this to a degree by letting apps adjust settings on the fly, based on what you’re about to watch. It’s effectively a system-wide version of Prime Video Calibrated Mode, which lets some Sony Bravia TVs adapt to the content on (you guessed it) Prime Video. Imagine a world in which you can go from watching a bright, motion-smoothed boxing match to appropriately subdued settings for a movie like The Witch. It doesn’t make much sense to leave saturation cranked up for Black Phillip.

There is the potential for things to go haywire, as you’d imagine — every TV has different specs, and what looks good to someone in one room can be miserable for another person in different circumstances. But handled correctly, Media Quality Manager could bring the best out of streaming video.

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2

A better Continue Watching experience

One of the most underrated smart TV features

Pocket-lint / Google

Something that’s always irritated me about Google TV is the Continue Watching section, which lets you pick up a movie, show, or YouTube video where you left off. It works well enough, I suppose, but it sometimes ends up buried in the Google TV homescreen — as you can see. It’s simply not as good as the Up Next feature on Apple TVs, even if Continue Watching has the advantage of Netflix support.

The exact changes Google has planned are a little hazy, but any attention is welcome. Tech companies are often too focused on the big marketing bullet points for their products, forgetting that if a product isn’t convenient, people tend to drop it like a hot stone. Few things are more important to reducing friction with a TV than getting people back into a video as soon as possible.

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3

Eclipsa Audio

Will there be any takers, though?

Sonos

In recent years,

Dolby Atmos
has become the de facto format for 3D surround sound. Other standards are out there — like DTS:X — but Atmos is typically the only one you can count on being available on services and devices. It’s even baked into TVs themselves sometimes, no matter that the internal speakers on most TVs can barely handle stereo.

Created by Google and Samsung, Eclipsa is described as “an open source spatial audio format for everyone.” Indeed, the first Google TV app to support it should be YouTube, not something like Netflix or Disney+. The long-term goal, however, may be to get around Dolby’s licensing fees, given that companies have to pay for the privilege of Atmos compatibility. If Eclipsa catches on, it could let TV makers provide 3D surround sound without cutting an extra check.

The format faces an uphill battle. Atmos is already so entrenched among TVs, speakers, and movie theaters that many studios and streaming services might not consider Eclipsa worth the effort. If adding support proves to be relatively trivial, though, that could be enough to kickstart adoption.

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4

Expanded Gemini support

Seeing is believing, though

Google

Gemini is technically already on Google TVs, providing things like movie summaries. But unsurprisingly, Google has much greater ambitions, and will soon provide things like YouTube answers to general knowledge questions — like, say, kid-friendly videos if you ask Gemini to explain the solar system to a first-grader. I’m worried about how this might hold up, given that generative AI is already prone to “hallucinating,” and YouTube’s algorithm has a disturbing tendency to funnel people towards right-wing content apropos of nothing.

Gemini should also be able to provide movie and show recommendations based on highly personal criteria, instead of just genres, actors, or directors. At Google I/O, one Netflix executive even used the prompt “I want something scary, but not too scary, and also maybe a little bit funny, but not like haha funny.” That sounds like Evil Dead 2 to me.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m a little skeptical about how useful these recommendations will be. It’s not like Gemini can know and rate the content of everything that exists, after all — it’s just basing its suggestions on titles, ratings, reviews, and other human-created content. For people willing to take a gamble, though, it’s not hard to imagine Gemini breaking them out of the rut of watching the same familiar movies and shows they grew up on. You can only watch The Office and The Empire Strikes Back so many times.

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