The Google Play through Enables the Google TV on every Purchase

Google took another step to build out its media donations today, between its Google Play stores to Google TV to make its leisure offerings accessible for the first time. Over the next few weeks, purchases and rentals made in the Play store will be available within Google TV. Users will also be able to buy and rent satisfied straight through the Google Play Store on Google TV. And any purchases made on a new device a Nexus 7 tablet, say, or an Android Smartphone will repeatedly show up as purchases on Google TV. 

"Google Play gives you one place to find, take pleasure in and share your favorite leisure with millions of songs and thousands of movies and TV shows for sale, and adds to the millions of leisure options accessible for you on Google TV," the company said in a blog post. 

It's a logical development for the Google Play store, which was re-branded from Android advertise previous this year. My associate Greg Sandoval broke the news that Play would sell movies in April. 

These features have long been obtainable on Apple TV. More newly, Amazon immediate Prime brings video purchases and rentals to the policy on which it is obtainable. Previously, Google Play on Google TV could be used only to buy applications. 

The Google Play update also accessible some goodies to developers payment billing, apps that update them routinely, and so-called "smart" updates, which let users download only the parts of an app that have distorted.

Android: Past, Present and Future

Google I/O's first keynote was all about Android and there were many imposing announcements.

Android stats continue to be surprising: 100 million activated Android devices, 400,000 Android devices activated every day, 200,000 apps in the Android Market, 4.5 billion apps downloaded from the Android Market, 310 Android devices.

The next major Android release is called Ice Cream Sandwich and the goal is to create a united operating system that runs on phones, tablets and TVs. Ice Cream Sandwich will be released later this year, but there's a Honeycomb 3.1 update that adds support for USB accessories and for Google TV. This summer, people who bought Google TV devices will be able to put in Android 3.1 and run apps from the Android Market

Android users from the US can now rent movies from the Android Market. "You can decide to rent from thousands of movies starting at $1.99 and have them available across your Android devices — rent a movie on your home computer, and it'll be obtainable for viewing on your tablet or phone. You can rent from Android Market on the web today, and we'll be systematic out an update to Verizon XOOM customers beginning today. We'll start undulating out the update to Android 2.2 and above devices in the coming weeks," informs Google.

There's no music subscription service, but Google launched an invitation-only service that stores all your music on Google's servers and lets you stream it from roughly any computer and Android device.

iPhone/iPod/iPad users can install the latest software updates for at least two years, but that's not always the case when it comes to Android devices. Some Android phones run outmoded software at launch and not all of them are updated to the latest version because phone manufacturers and carriers don't think that's really important. Google and some of the other members of the Open Handset Alliance (Verizon, HTC, Samsung, Sprint, Sony Ericsson, LG, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Motorola and AT&T) started to expand some guidelines for updating firmware. "To start, we're equally announcing that new devices from participating partners will be given the latest Android platform upgrades for 18 months after the device is first released, as long as the hardware allows," informs Google.

Google also urbanized Android Open Accessory, "which allows external USB hardware (an Android USB accessory) to interrelate with an Android-powered device in a special accessory mode. (...) Many previously released Android-powered devices are only able of acting as a USB device and cannot initiate connections with external USB devices. Android Open Accessory support overcomes this limitation and allows you to build accessories that can interact with an collection of Android-powered devices by allowing the accessory commence the connection."

Probably the most interesting announcement is Android@Home, a framework that allows Android devices to converse with home appliances and other devices. It's an ambitious project that could make home automation part of everyday life. That's also one of the main reasons why Google bought Android: bringing Google's software to new devices, finding new ways to use Google's information in each day life, creating an ecosystem of smart devices with standard features and APIs that make "the world's information" more useful.

Google TV's First Apps

Google announced some of the initial content partners for Google TV: Turner Broadcasting, NBC Universal, HBO, Netflix, Amazon. The list is far from impressive, but this is just the beginning.

At launch, Google TV will run Android 2.1 and will include Chrome 5.0 and Adobe Flash 10.1. Google will pre-load a few high-quality apps like Pandora, Netflix, NBA, while the Android Market will be available early next year, after Google releases the SDK.

The good news is that web apps could work well on a TV if they are properly designed. YouTube Leanback is a great example of web app optimized for Google TV. Since it's not easy to develop web apps for TVs, Google offers some guidelines: TV interfaces should be simple, navigation and content are very important, the app should take advantage of the wide screen.

Google TV has an Apple-esque site and will start to be available this month on devices made by Sony and Logitech. "One of our goals with Google TV is to finally open up the living room and enable new innovation from content creators, programmers, developers and advertisers," says Google's Ambarish Kenghe.

YouTube Leanback

YouTube released now a preview of the Google TV interface: it's called as YouTube Leanback. "YouTube Leanback is all about letting you to sit back, relax and be entertained. Videos tailored to your interests play as soon as then you visit the site and they play in full screen and high definition, continuously. There's no need to click, search, or browse, unless you want to, of course. Watching YouTube becomes as easy as watching TV," suggests YouTube's blog.

By default, YouTube plays videos from your subscriptions, but you can also select a category to play the popular comedy videos, short films, music videos, news, travel videos and more. The interface doesn't work with a mouse, as you can only use the arrow keys and then Enter to skip a video, select a category, search, pause or resume a video. YouTube Leanback will work well with the Google TV's remote control, but you can also install an application like Air Mouse on your mobile phone.

Leanback is not the first YouTube interface designed for TVs: there's also YouTube XL, but the interface isn't fluid and there are too many options that get in the way.