Google is killing Play Movies & TV, will only have three video stores left
Luckily Google still sells video content through YouTube, Android TV, and Google TV.
Google is the only brand I know of where people go out of their way to own the hardware but do everything in their power to avoid the software.
Wait, no. Razor... Razor exists. NO ONE'S MOUSE NEEDS A DAILY DRIVER UPDATE!
It's not like that in all areas. It's the exact opposite for their phones. Pixels are trash quality hardware with great software.
Google is just a massive disappointment in 2023...
I was one of the lucky ones with my 6, I will admit... but I'm not up for another round. I'll be an Asus boy in two years if they're still playing a good game, or maybe a Linux phone and keep my 6 as a backup for more proprietary crap if I'm really feeling frisky.
That doesn't quite line up when you consider how popular it is to buy a Pixel just to flash GrapheneOS on it.
Did they not turn this into Google TV already? Not to be confused with Google TV, YouTube TV, Android TV or the old Google TV
No this was all merged into YouTube many years ago after it was announced long before that they were ending it. This is Lemmy so everyone is just gonna pretend Google just announced this and make a big deal out of it because "Google bad"
It was changed into Google TV on phones only, now it's being killed on Android TV's. Extra layer to the confusion, depending on what platform you are using changes what the app is named...
I swear this company used to have its shit together.
They had a really amazing search algorithm that they used to make ad revenue and then made a bunch of stuff because the engineers were bored.
Eric Schmidt was amazing as CEO. Then he left and Page took over. He was okay, but nothing great. Then Pichai took over. He is an absolute douchenozzle and is basically there to just make as much money as possible all while trashing everything that made Google great. Google search sucks nowadays, YouTube is overrun with ads, and nothing interesting at all has happened with Android in a long time.
Ha fuck you pleeb. We so fucking rich we drivin' g wagons to work wearing crocs and sweat pants then when g wagon gets full of mustard from our sandwiches we just buy another. Our shit is so far from together but ain't nothing gonna stop us. Also we just deleted your mom's GDrive because we can.
—Google probably
The downside of throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks is that you end up having to clean up a whole lot of shit of the floor.
And every time you do, the next shit has a harder time sticking.
Stadia was doomed from the start because nobody was willing to commit to it in fear of Google killing it, and that meant it wouldn't get enough users and would get killed.
I honestly didn't know they still had Google Play Movies and TV still, I'd assumed they'd folded it completely into the YouTube movies brand already.
As a Google Play Music user, I'm retroactively angry. I would've loved that many years of GPM while they worked a couple (not enough) of the kinks out of YTM. And I wish I still had access to Google's music store, since Amazon doesn't sell in Canada and I hate having to install a desktop application to shop at Apple.
Ever since Sundar Pichai took over as CEO, Google has just gotten boring as a company, overall, and has forgotten or discontinued its products more than actually innovate like they used to.
I have no freaking idea what the hell Google is doing detaching all these apps then being extra aggressive at getting me to use it.
If I want a song, am I doing YouTube, YouTube Music, or Google Music?
Podcasts are even worst, because theres Google Podcasts too.
YouTube Music. Google Music doesn't exist anymore.
And YouTube / YouTube music is technically the same service, the data source is the same. The front-end is the only difference, similar to shorts and regular YouTube.
Google has truly mastered the fine arts of wasting money
Jesus fucking Christ, what a clusterfuck.
I can't wait to not be able to spend google play store credits on renting movies anymore, just like there's no way to spend google play store credits on purchasing albums or songs 🙃
I'm surprised Sundar isn't on the hot seat at this point.
People are gonna be like "oh well he presided over X revenue growth and that's all investors care about". Investors also care about future returns.
Under Sundar, Google has more or less completely failed to diversify. They've had the advantage on several products, only for them to dick around while their competitors established (or re-established) dominance. The areas where they have market dominance went from "we have the far superior product" to "this Lowkey sucks, but I can't think of anything better".
As far as I'm concerned Sundar is Google's Sculley. Google will go for a long time under its own momentum, but eventually the wheels will come off.
Meanwhile Nadella is getting paid a quarter as much.
First Play Music, now Play Movies. Hopefully Play Books isn't next.
Knowing Google I wouldn't be surprised at all if they do remove Play Books and fuck over all the customers, just for that 1% increase in profits lol.
Shhhhh, I think maybe they’ve forgotten about it….
Honestly my preferred epub platform.
Add it to the list https://killedbygoogle.com/
They've gotten to the point where new ventures are doomed before they start because no one can trust that the product they're investing time and money in will be around in a year.
Another one for the pile
Doesn't surprise me. They never even supported it with the Assistant / Google Home. There's pretty much zero point in onboarding with any Google products anymore.
I got some Google home mini devices and now none of them work to do basically anything of value. Actually I shouldn't say now, they stopped doing the basic functions I wanted them for around 2 years ago.
Telling it to play a show on TV doesnt work, which is essentially why I bought them. The most they can do now is basic on and off functions. They were constantly going off at random times when no one was talking. They have now become fancy looking paperweights.
I also have Google TV which is slowly becoming worse and worse. I recently bought my kids Rokus because they had all the same functions as Google but without the microphone remote. They were half the price and are working better than my Google TV.
Finally, I don't need to disable this app anymore when I have a new phone
ADB is your friend. Uninstall any app you don't need/want.
Have you met Google? The app will still be there for years to come. It will be broken, but it'll never disappear.
Unfortunately I know them, I recently wiped a pixel 3 and I noticed that the latest ROM still has play music. The latest ROM update is from November 2021 and it still has play music. Almost one year after the complete shutdown and over three years after the deprecation they fucking continued to include play music in the system rom...
So does this mean those of us who have bought content through Play Movies will lose access to those?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
On third-party smart TVs (this is a different category than today's Android TV announcement) the app was killed in 2021.
How any normal person is supposed to understand that pile of Google media brands, and how it works across phones, the web, and various smart TV OSes, is beyond me.
The idea back in the 2010s was to compete with the digital media revolution Apple created with iTunes, the iPod, and the iPhone.
Most of the media stores started in the Android Market but then pivoted to a more Google-wide offering with the launch of Google Play branding in 2012.
Nothing at Google is ever stable, though, and the company's other media stakeholders sought to pick apart what the Android Team had built.
All the apps will be dead in October, and presumably, that means the now-useless store will be booted from the web interface as well.
The original article contains 711 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Good riddance. Less bullshit to uninstall when I get a new phone.
This isn't even talking about phones.
It's actually bad news for me because I bought a bunch of movies living in the UK (moved to Canada now) that I can't access through YouTube but can through Google Play movies.
Going through support is like dealing with monkeys. They have no idea what they're doing.
Movies Anywhere is your friend here. Buy a movie from one store, watch it from any other store. Not sure how it works when one store shuts down, hopefully you keep it in all the other stores.
I actually had no idea this was an app or what it did lmao. Google has so many confusing things like this.
Actually a good thing though, it should all be merged into one.
It was, years ago. It’s part of YouTube’s rentals/purchase feature now.
Nothing of value was lost
What happens to my films?
I don't care.
You cared enough to open the post and make this comment.
It was a ton of effort too, I'm just exhausted.