LAURENCE MORONEY: Welcome to the Googleplex.
Today we're going to be talking with Alan Huang.
He's here from the Android TV team
that brings Android into your living room
and allows you as an application developer
to reach people in their living room.
Android TV is one of these products
that I think we all know a little bit about it,
but maybe we don't know exactly what it is,
so could you tell us exactly what is Android TV?
ALLEN HUANG: What we're really doing
with Android TV is we're bringing Android, this OS that
is widely popular and people are super
familiar with because they're using it on a day-to-day basis
all the time, and bring that experience to the living room
and across a variety of devices on actual smart TVs
that you're buying, you know, 60 inch televisions, as well as
boxes that you connect to your television,
whether that's a box that's coming from whoever's
giving you your cable television or a box you're connecting
to stream different content.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
Now, one of my favorite features in Android is Google Now.
That gives me like personalized recommendations.
And one of my problems with TV at the moment
is that there's so many different, either channels
on cable or different sources of on demand video
and trying to find what I want to watch is really difficult.
Is there some kind of recommendation
engine that thinks about what I like to watch
and maybe bubbles that to the top in Android TV?
ALLEN HUANG: One of our big focus areas
when we were thinking about what Android TV should be was,
we centered around this concept of, when
you get home after a long day at work, your IQ almost goes down,
right?
You're sitting in front of the TV.
The last thing you want to think about
is, OK, what am I going to watch?
And look through a ton of listings
and try to just figure all of that out.
And so what we've done is, the centerpiece
of the home screen on Android TV is this recommendation show.
And what we're doing there is combining
a few pieces of information.
We're taking all of the stuff that the apps that you have,
the TV providers that you have, taking all of that information
and then mixing it together to showcase, OK,
what are the things that we think you'll want to watch.
The apps provide these recommendations.
And then we sort of rank based on what apps
you've been using in the past.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
Cool.
Now, I understand that you were down in Las Vegas
at CES, launching some Android TV stuff quite recently.
And we all know how crazy CES can be.
But what happened?
What did you do?
What did you launch?
What was going on?
ALLEN HUANG: For Android TV, the main reason we were there
was helping support our partners as they were launching
the first really Android TV devices that
are going to be outside of our own Nexus player device.
And so, what we saw was Sony announcing
that their entire Bravia 2K and 4K TVs in this coming 2015
line-- they're all going to be running Android TVs.
So Sharp also announced that their 4K televisions
would be running Android TV.
And then Razer is working on a gaming console that's
running on Android TV and features
a wide variety of games.
And they actually won the best of CES
in the gaming category, as well as the People's Choice Award.
And we have these partners developing
these incredible devices on the Android TV platform.
For me, it was really exciting to see.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah, that sounds cool.
Now, you mentioned the gaming console.
Is that out yet or is that coming soon?
ALLEN HUANG: Razer is working hard in order
and we're getting to that point where that
should be coming very soon.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Now my understanding
is because that runs Android TV, it has a version of the Play
Store so then anybody who can build a game
and put it into the Play Store now
has a console that they can build for.
ALLEN HUANG: Yeah, the experience for a developer
is that Play Store works much the same way that you would
expect on a phone or a tablet.
You're using the same Play Store developer console.
You're creating just Android apps,
with a different interface, with a different UI.
But really it's the same Android API.
It's the same Android development model.
And it's just going to transfer from device to device.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK, so if I'm an existing Android developer,
building for phones and maybe building for tablets, then if I
want to reach the form factor of the TV,
I'm pretty much using the same APIs?
ALLEN HUANG: Yeah absolutely.
I mean, Android TV is on Lollipop, just
like every other device.
And all of the APIs that you know
and love that you're using already,
they're just going to work, right?
Like one of the big differences with Android TV,
compared with the other efforts, is
that we're on the same cycle as phone, as tablet, as ware,
as auto, and I think we talk about how if the Android TV
team doesn't finish the work that we need to finish,
we're going to delay everything.
All of Android is--
LAURENCE MORONEY: No pressure.
ALLEN HUANG: Yeah, no, no pressure.
We're a core part there.
And so with that comes just tons of benefits.
It makes a lot of sense for developers.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool, cool.
So now there must be some differences
though when building for the Leanback form factor,
the TV as opposed to the small device that's in your hand.
Like what kind of challenges do you see developers facing
and what have you done to help them?
ALLEN HUANG: One you don't have a touch screen.
Maybe one day, our partners are going to build a touch screen
TV and that'll be really cool.
But for the most part, these TVs are
things that are you're interacting with a D-pad.
So left, right, up, down, center click.
You'll have the back and home that you
have on every Android device.
And that's the basic interaction model, and it's very simple.
It matches that sort of whole mentality of,
I'm in front of my living room.
I'm not really thinking that hard.
I don't want a computing device, I want an entertainment device.
The other thing beyond sort of the interaction
is that you are sitting 10 feet away from this screen.
And you know the font sizes need to be
the size that they need to be.
All the images that are on screen need to be bigger,
and you need to think about them being more cinematic.
And people have a certain expectation of,
on television things being sort of moving, and cinematic,
and it being that sort of engaging experience.
And so, that's all things that we're
thinking very carefully about as we're developing Android TV.
As far as what we've done for developers,
we've tried to make this really easy for them.
And so we have this model of having support libraries
that we've published and made available
along with the Android SDK to make it really easy for people
to just have that sort of UI and interaction model.
So these support libraries provide almost sort
of templates that people could plug in their information,
take their Android tablet app, and plug that in and have
this rich, engaging, immersive UI, and have it displayed,
and have all the transitions and animations that I
was talking about.
From there, a developer can take that and run with it
and publish it to Play Store almost immediately.
Or they can do lots of things like customize it,
sort of make it their brand, take those and then
just build upon that.
And then we also have developers that will start totally
from scratch.
They're like, oh hey, yeah, this support library is great,
but I'd rather just create a whole experience.
And they're just developing an Android app.
LAURENCE MORONEY: That's kind of mind blowing
when you think about it.
That when, in the past if you're building for a TV set-top box
or for a console, it was an entirely different world.
What you're bringing now is the same world into it.
And yes, there are some differences, of course,
but you're trying to mitigate the difficulties that might
come from those differences.
Cool.
What about like any kind of scenarios
for interesting types of apps?
ALLEN HUANG: I'm really excited about what's to come,
what developers are going to do.
For phones and tablets, people who built the operating system
never imagined, sort of the possibilities of what people
would go and create and have become just
absurdly popular-- ways for you to get picked up from anywhere
and be able to take you to any other place.
Other really amazing stuff that I've seen
is, so Dish just announced their Sling app
that you can have physical this subscription experience where
you're getting a core set of channels, getting,
for me, like the ESPN, all of that is amazing.
I've seen really fun apps.
E24 is a good example, where they've made it
so that you can actually order food from your TV screen
and order it and have it delivered to your home.
It sort of runs the gamut.
Our team's goal is to provide the tools for people
to build whatever they can imagine and then see
where it goes from there.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I'm waiting for the 3D
printer that can print a pizza.
And order that through my TV.
ALLEN HUANG: Yeah, immediate delivery.
LAURENCE MORONEY: That would be crazy So thinking
of like developers, and we're saying that like the experience
is very familiar.
As an Android developer, do you have any words like for anybody
who wants to get started today?
Maybe they're not an Android developer already
or maybe they've been building for phones.
What advice would you give to folks who want to get started?
ALLEN HUANG: Absolutely take a look at our support library.
The feedback we get from a lot of developers is like, oh man,
that was a lot easier I thought it would be.
And just to get started that way,
messing around and experimenting,
and trying a few things out, especially when
we've provided some of the basic templates
so that you don't have to worry about that.
I think it goes a long way.
Being quite honest, there are lots
of apps that aren't very good, but at the very least,
you're developing out the skills, the experience,
and then it's like sort of an iterative process, I think.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And we are really only at day zero.
Right?
There's great stuff still to come.
And try, if you're going to fail, try again.
If you're going to fail, try again and just keep
getting better incrementally.
I mean for developers.
So actually one question that I had, I was thinking,
because I've played a little bit with development,
but I have like the hardware.
I mean, is there like an emulator or something like that
so if people don't have the hardware,
that they can see what things would look like on a TV?
ALLEN HUANG: So as part of Android Studio,
and all those tools, we have the emulator available for Android
TV, alongside all about emulators that you have,
so you can see that experience.
We had the ADT-1 give away and hopefully
many of the early developers got their hands on one
and were able to start development
using this device that we internally know and love
because we used it for quite awhile just
to get people started.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So we've had a lot
of success in the living room with Chromecast,
which is a fabulous product.
But how does that fit in with Android TV,
in particular from a developer perspective?
What should developers be thinking about?
ALLEN HUANG: Cast has been incredibly successful in sort
of introducing this new model for how people interact
with their living room.
Tying back to what I said about the living room being
this really simple space, where people aren't looking
for computing devices, being able to take something and so
easily throw it onto your screen,
it's just very intuitive for people.
LAURENCE MORONEY: It's magical.
ALLEN HUANG: Yeah, exactly.
It is.
I mean, I've heard people say that.
It's like, oh, my god, how did that happen?
And it's something we want to continue.
I think that interaction model, we
baked Google Cast as a core part of Android TV.
So everything that works with the Chromecast,
you're able to take that and then cast, pick up your phone
and then cast it to any Android TV device.
Then from a developer perspective,
you have these two models where you're
developing this cast-integrated experience,
as well as this Android TV app, and developers
are going to ask, well, that seems like there's
a lot of stuff going on.
One of the key things is that you
want to be able to interact with your service, your app,
in a variety of different ways.
You have this first screen app, this
on phones, and for similar reasons why
you want to have a tablet experience too,
that's why you'd want to have a TV experience.
So if you're just streaming content,
casting make a lot of sense.
And having that experience gets you the ability
to get your content on all the Chromecast devices, as well
as all the Android TV devices.
But then beyond that, if you want
to have suggestions on screen or recommendations
or integration into search, or just even like auto
playing to the next video or being
able to show multiple videocasts at once,
I think that's where you have this Android TV native app
experience.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
But as a developer, if I've invested
in the skills and building for cast, they're not wasted.
ALLEN HUANG: Yeah.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I can continue building for Android TV.
I could just extend my skills set.
ALLEN HUANG: Yeah.
Yeah.
Totally.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
ALLEN HUANG: I'm so excited to see what
they're going to come up with.
And you know, personally, I joined this team
about a year ago and the living room is an exciting space.
I think it's right before-- I mean,
we are already seeing lots and lots
of changes in this environment and ecosystem.
More and more people are just streaming content.
And--
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cord-cutting is becoming commonplace, right?
ALLEN HUANG: Yeah, absolutely.
And there's a meme that people are just
moving all their time to tablets and to phones and to computers.
At least for me, I still watch like multiple hours
of television every day.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Absolutely, me too.
ALLEN HUANG: For me, this is almost embarrassing to say,
I fall asleep to the television quite often.
I think there's room for so much progress in how
we watch television.
But just keeping in mind like, hey, this
is about making it simple and easy.
And for me, that's a really fun challenge.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool, cool.
Well, thanks, Allen.
And this has been a really fun chat that we've had.
And everybody, thanks for watching
this episode of "Coffee with a Googler" with Allen Huang.
We spoke about Android TV.
We learned about all the great ways
we can get started with developing for Android TV,
using our existing Android skills.
We have some links after the end of the video
and they'll be in the description below.
And again, thank you so much, Allen, for coming.
ALLEN HUANG: Yeah, cool Thank you.