Google sucks. I want to love it, but every few months, it does something that makes me shake my head. Most recently, it’s made it a lot more confusing to buy/rent TV shows.
The company has removed the ability to buy TV shows from Google TV. You can still buy/rent movies, but if you want a television show, you must purchase it via YouTube.
Google has offered no explanation for this, but if I had to guess, it must have run into a rights issue that only allows content bought on one platform (YouTube) to be shown on that same platform.
If you’re not really in the Google Ecosystem, Google TV is an app and a smart TV operating system. It replaced Android TV years ago, and the app replaced Google Play Movies and TV, the previous home of movie/TV rentals on Android. The app/platform promised to help curate all the content that’s streaming, but since Netflix never played ball, the service didn’t really become much more than a decent-looking smart TV OS.
What does that mean for me?
Anything you’ve already bought from Google TV or YouTube will still appear in both the YouTube and Google TV apps, but any TV shows you buy in the future will be locked to the YouTube platform.
Obviously, you can still watch your shows on Google TV, but now you need to open the YouTube app and find your shows there first.
Hopefully, someday soon, YouTube will become more tightly integrated into Google TV, but as of the time of writing, this whole situation is very messy.
I’d also suggest not buying any movies from Google TV for the next little bit. If you want to rent something from Google I think it would be prudent to do it via YouTube right now just in case.
What Google needs to do
Google should have linked YouTube and Google TV at the hip years ago. Google TV should have been the platform, but besides every purchase, it should have said you were buying that show/movie on YouTube in small print.
This would have allowed customers to know that they’re buying content from YouTube but still accessing it through the library folder on their smart TV.
It would also have avoided this situation, where users could now buy TV shows on YouTube and movies on Google TV. If the company really wants to streamline things, it should just route all media purchases through the YouTube app and then backdoor that into the Google TV platform.
Source: Google TV Help
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