Joe Maring / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google has reportedly reduced the budget for its smart TV group by 10%.
- Despite the reduction, the company promises “an exciting road map ahead.”
- Up to a quarter of the members of the 300-strong group could be impacted by the change.
Google has not made it particularly easy to be a fan of Android TV. While the platform is absolutely chock-full of potential, it’s been incredibly frustrating to see it treated like such an afterthought, year after year. Why is no one making high-end Android TV hardware? How has gaming on the platform been so utterly neglected? If you had any hope of Google maybe turning things around and breathing some fresh life into Android TV, we’ve got some bad news for you.
According to The Information, Google has made some significant cuts to its Google TV and Android TV programs. As many as a quarter of the 300-some employees making up its smart TV group could be affected, as Google reduces its budget by 10%.
The news follows months of efforts to more broadly reduce the size of Google’s platforms and devices group, with the company offering buyouts to the lucky (and layoffs to the not-so-much) — of which this smart TV group is part. This latest round just specifically targets Google’s resources for further development of Google TV and Android TV.
While Google may be less interested in your living room’s big screen as a platform, this news arrives alongside word of YouTube’s rise to dominance among major streaming platforms, and really highlights just how fractured the company’s approach here is: Google cares very much about those living room eyeballs being glued to a YouTube stream, but seemingly much less if the stream’s arriving via a Roku device, or Fire TV, or webOS.
That said, it’s not like Google is giving up on smart TVs entirely, and the group is reportedly looking to offset immediate personnel losses by increased international hiring. A spokesperson tells The Information:
We continue to invest in Google TV with new user experiences including the upcoming integration of Gemini. There are more than 270 million Android TV devices, and we remain committed to growing this ecosystem with an exciting road map ahead.
We’d love to see Google really kick its smart TV efforts up a notch, and while words like those sound encouraging, they’re just really difficult to resolve against bottom-line moves like a 10% cut to the budget