Google is working with Intel, Sony and other partners to develop Google TV, a service aimed at putting the Internet search giant’s Web offerings in people’s living rooms, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
Google TV will combine the company’s Android mobile operating system and applications with television devices made for the OS, including set-top boxes, the paper says.
The TV technology will run on Intel’s Atom chips, the report says, and Google will develop a new version of its Chrome browser for the TV project.
In a similar report, The Wall Street Journal reported some of the same information. Both papers cited unnamed sources for their information.
“We don’t comment on rumor or speculation,” a Google spokesperson said. Sony also declined to comment on the report.
The use of Android for TV could put applications and other software developed for the OS on TVs in addition to smartphones, the devices the OS was designed for. The companies working on the project, which also reportedly include Logitech, “envision technology that will make it easy for TV users to navigate Web applications, like the Twitter social network and the Picasa photo site, as it is to change the channel,” The New York Times says.
Google will open the TV platform to Android developers as part of the initiative, with a software developer’s kit, The New York Times reports.
Several companies have already started using Android in devices made for TVs, including set-top boxes and 2D/3D graphics accelerators, designed around MIPS Technologies’ chip architecture. MIPS and its partners have done the development work on Android to tweak it for use in such devices.
Android was designed to work with Arm processing cores, the most popular cores in smartphones, but some companies have ported Android to other chip processing architectures, including MIPS and Intel’s x86 processing architecture.