Google TV: Watch Movies & TV Reviews

by Kevin N Jennings

For a Google product, GoogleTV is astonishing awful. I’ve used more of it recently for tv shows I love that have left Netflix and other streaming platforms. Here are the problem areas: 1) you can purchase all seasons of a series (1-10) but the interface doesn’t acknowledge you bought all of them and doesn’t separate them out. So you have to search hundreds of episodes in a single line and the same seasons you purchased that are broken out by season ask you to purchase them again to view them in that menu. It’s absurd. 2) there is no “return to view” or “continue watching” orientation in the UI except the one episode you were in anchored at the top of the experience. Once you complete that episode, you have to go back to the menu and find where you were and play the next episode. 3) the experience claims to allow “binge watching” but most shows do not auto play the next episode even when the feature is turned on. After each episode you have to go find your place and play the next which makes it even harder when 1) and 2) above are so poor. Honestly guys, put your celebrated “design sprints” in action and get the right folks from product, ux and design in a room and fix this shitshow. And maybe look at how seasons are sold and appear in the UI vs. buying each individual episode. Not rocket science here

by Stephen L, NYC

Tried to use this on a flight without having to pay for internet. Downloaded two movies with seemingly no issues but once airborne tried to play them and it tried to connect to the internet? What's the point of downloading then? Had to spend $40 for in flight Wifi to try to get through my paid movies. And even then it hung up every five minutes for seemingly no reason. Had to force close and jump through hoops to try to get it to restart, not to mention having to spend the $40.

Is any testing done on GoogleTV?

Honestly I get why people pirate. It's a way better user experience.

by Todd729

There are so many things wrong with GoogleTV
(and Google products in general) that it boggles the mind. There are too many bizarre malfunctions to cover in a review, but I’ll name a few of my favorites. (1)You can’t scrub forward or back without encountering an endless spinning wheel in the middle of the screen that remains in place until you exit and reload. This has persisted for years. (2) Movies now default to audio voiceover mode for the visually impaired, and there’s no apparent way to disable this feature in the settings. So you just want to watch a movie like everyone else, and there’s suddenly a weird voice talking over the action. There’s a potential workaround to disable it, but it involves some strange nonsense about selecting the second duplicate “English” setting on the menu before exiting and reloading. (Makes zero sense, and just trying to explain what’s happening sounds bananas and is exhausting). (3) You can’t go back to the beginning of the movie. You just can’t. It freezes. You try again, and it freezes again. Finally, randomly, it works. You get the point, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

by Isthisnametakenyet74837483

I’m boggled by the user interface here. Upset that Friends was leaving Netflix, I bought the entire series for only $50 through Google Play. Great deal! However, the player is crap. First of all, it’s not separated by season. If I want to watch something later in the series, I have to scroll through allllll the episodes before it. It’s also not super obvious where you left off. The episode titles also do not fit on the tiles, not even close. So basically the only info you get is “Season 4 episode 2...The One...” (“The One” is how all the episode titles start). If you leave it on binge watching mode, the next episode starts before the current one is over (seriously! How is this an issue in this day and age?). If you turn binge watch mode off, then once an episode ends, it goes back to the menu with all the episodes, but not scrolled to the episode you just watched or anywhere near there. There is a “Last Watched” indicator on the last watched episode but you have to be right on top of the episode tile to see it. Lastly, there is no option to go back 10-15 seconds like with most other streaming services. Everything about this UI is so so so bad.

by Breezymeeks

We have almost 300 movies, including sets we have purchased as a package. Google doesn’t organize these sets together, nor do they have a search feature in your library. It is alphabetical, but you can imagine how annoying that is when you must scroll through hundreds of movies to find one the one you want, especially when some are or organized by a “the” or “Disney’s ___”. You can’t save lists or favorite frequently watched movies to make them easily accessible.
If you stop a movie mid way, and resume it on another device or cast to a different tv, it doesn’t save your place.
There are no parent control features allowing you to separate or block adult content from kids, so if they have GoogleTV they can access anything purchased. Nothing about this is customizable. Why is GoogleTV so far behind all the other steaming services?!
After investing so much into a major platform I assumed would perform competitively, this is extremely disappointing. Do better, Google. GoogleTV is a joke.

by Jenifer Cordova

Everything was peaches until by mistake I deleted the movie I’d purchased. I tried to download it again and the second movie I’ve purchased from GoogleTV but I can’t download it. The main reason I got GoogleTV and made purchases was because of my 2 year old who loves “Finding Dory” so I bought the movie from Google Play. It worked sure fine when I bought back in middle of December. I’d recently purchased “The Lion King” and my son loves it. I tried to download it to his iPad and by mistake I deleted his “Finding Dory” movie so I thought it wasn’t going to be a big deal if I just download it again but IT IS NOT WORKING!!!! I have done everything... and when I mean everything, I did everything. Obviously got in touch with “Support” and the guy tried to help me as much as he could but didn’t solve the problem. I am upset that I can’t download the movies to my son’s iPad, we have to sit in traffic for near two hrs and that was my only way to keep him entertained but not anymore. Please GOOGLE have an update soon and fix this issue. Sincerely, a desperate mom! 🙏🏻

by EllieMarcelli

The idea with purchasing a movie, and downloading it, is that you can play it anytime you want, without having to be connected to the internet. If that’s your objective, do not purchase movies from google, and attempt to play them with GoogleTV. When they’ve been downloaded, you still need to be connected to the internet to play them…intermittently. Most times it won’t start unless you’re connected to the internet. If you want to fast forward the movie, it will hang up; you need to reconnect to the internet. You have to close GoogleTV and reopen it, and then you’re back to the part of the movie you started at, not the part you ended at. I certainly bought the movies; but do I own them? Apparently not unless Google has unrestricted access to my computer (via their app) the whole time I’m watching the movie I bought. Guess what happens when you try deleting their hideous app and reinstalling it (because maybe it’s just broken); you get to re-download all of your movies.

by 3609phoenix

I downloaded GoogleTV so I can watch movies on my IPad Pro. After seeing how great this looks I started to download all my movies for offline viewing. It took me three days and a lot of internet use but I finally downloaded all of them. After a few weeks and an update to my IPad all of my movies show they are not downloaded and now I have to repeat this process. Really?!! What sense does it make for me to go through that long process again and wonder if this will happen again. I’m not sure who is at fault, Apple because they hate that I won’t purchase their movies,or Google because they hate I’m watching it on the IPad. There is no guarantee this won’t happen again, and I don’t want to burn through unnecessary data. SOMEBODY PLEASE GET IT TOGETHER!!!

UPDATE!!!
There is no point downloading a movie. As soon as there is an iOS update Apple will remove those downloads and you will have to start all over.

by XWillpower

I was assigned to watch a movie for school, so I gave this platform a try. I rented the movie for 2 days. It played well for the first hour and 15 minutes. Suddenly the sound quit working, and it started playing a previous part of the movie. I closed the movie, then GoogleTV , and came back. It told me the movie was expired. I uninstalled and reinstalled and got access to the movie again, but it skipped me forward to basically the very end. When I tried to rewind it would get stuck at the end. Finally got it back on track, then 5 minutes later audio cut out and it started showing a previous part of the movie *again*. Uninstalled and reinstalled AGAIN, and it started the movie over. I tried to fast forward, and it sent me to the end once again. Big waste of time.

by Mrsaol

I received a gift card for Google play and was excited to finally use it to purchase a movie! I am very disappointed however that I have been unable to watch the movie that I purchased. I have tried to watch it several ways, through GoogleTV , on my Apple TV, through my headphones, and not a single way works! On the screen sometimes I can hear the sound but I cannot see the picture and other times I see the picture with no sound. I can’t believe that I can’t even plug-in Bluetooth earphones because if you do it will not play. I have tried several times to play the movie but to no avail. I am really frustrated! I am very surprised at a product like this from Google. I sure hope that GoogleTV gets fixed. Google has such good products it doesn’t make sense to have a product like this if it is not good and brings down your brand. It’s sad to say but one negative can cancel out so many positives. That just seems the nature of the human condition. With that being said I like your other products...but not this one. Please fix it. I’d like to watch my movie and I am nervous to purchase any more movies with my gift card!

by Eddie Eddie 1234

It’s Father’s Day. All I wanted to do was eat a steak, have a glass of scotch, and watch Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Steak. Check. Scotch. Check. Now I have a one year old which means seeing a movie in the theater is not an option. Upon looking this movie up, I found it to be available only on GoogleTV. Alright, I’ll give it a shot and pay the required $15 for the movie. First hour was fine. Streaming clearly. Then, glitch after glitch after glitch. I discovered, if I stopped the movie then restarted, it would fix itself. But towards the end of the movie, I had to stop and restart about every 5 minutes. GoogleTV is absolute garbage. I’ll be deleting this from my device immediately and never using again. Good thing my steak and scotch were good otherwise GoogleTV may have ruined Father’s Day.

by AwkwardMoose1

When I updated GoogleTV recently, I got a notification when I opened it that the latest update deleted all my downloads. Fine, not a problem, I can download them again. Except now it will download to 99% and get stuck. When I check back hours later, it will eventually tell me I do not have permission to download the movies I purchased. This is incredibly frustrating.

Another suggestion I have come up with over the years is to add a way for movies to be hidden from My Library. I understand not wanting to let people delete movies so it doesn’t happen by accident, but when digital movies first became a thing, you got free movies all the time. Some of them are terrible, were unwanted in the first place, and don’t need to be in my library.

by Steve-of-indiana

I live in a rural location & Internet speed is quite slow the main thing I like about GoogleTV is I can download videos & play them through TVs without buffering.

There are a LOT of things I do not like about GoogleTV - the biggest annoyances are

1) you cannot buy movies through GoogleTV
2) the algorithm for "recommended by play" is either badly flawed or does not take into account my purchase history
3) it would really be nice if there was an "ignore list" so that videos that do not interest me would not keep being listed
4) there is not an age level block on the “recommended” list — needed if you want to hand an iPad to a young child

I have seen several people indicating they have playback problems. As I mentioned my Internet access is quite slow but I have had good luck downloading movies to my iPad & watching them on a TV that has a Chromecast plugged into HDMI. This also works well when my wife & I visit with our children while their children watch a movie from my iPad on the TV.

by Nelcent

I don’t normally write these but this issue has happened a couple of times, across multiple devices, and with multiple movies so it’s become a bit of a pattern.

It seems to work well for the first hour or so of a movie but more and more recently, around an hour and 15 or so I get a playback error. I closed the whole app and quit it, thinking that would help but it just started me at the beginning of the movie with no ability to skip to where I had been previously. If I try to skip ahead, it just buffers endlessly. If it does finally start playing, it will start playing the sound of where I wanted it to start but the pictures of a few minutes into the movie.

by Marks327

I got GoogleTV to download tv series for areas that don’t have WiFi. I started using it and had a few issues with downloading but finally got a full season to download. About a week later it tells me I have to connect to internet to renew my subscription. So, I did. Then a few days later I have lost the entire season downloaded.
Last night I went to watch a season of another show and it had lost the entire season I had downloaded of it also.
It takes a lot of time to download 20+ episodes for each season and I don’t want to have to keep downloading the same ones over and over again. Very frustrating.

by Riss...MnM

As a movie watcher i watch them a lot but when i do i buy the movie so i can watch it again but i logged into my account again and the movie that i loved was deleted from what i paid for but for some reason a week later it came back i don't know if it glitched out or u guys fixed but sometimes when i rent a movie it glitches back to play movie and restarts and then i have to re watch it but most of it is fine there r some bugs that i would love for you guys to fix so i rated it this way because of the bugs.

by OscarMikeGolf

Usually I have no problem with GoogleTV. These days on certain movies or shows I watch it’ll play for 20 seconds and the screen will freeze but the audio continues on. And the 10 second playback option leaves the loading icon on the screen unless I exit out of full screen mode and play the movie or show again. Also I cannot rewind the movies and shows back to the beginning so I have to watch the entire thing to the end credits then watch it over, and hope that the video doesn’t freeze again.

by Reviewyoucantrust

I usually don’t leave reviews but please update GoogleTV back in 2020 GoogleTV did its job things weren’t great but they were fine 2021 same story did okay a few bugs here and there but still good 2022 there’s audio cracking(chirp noises,etc)playback skipping(it will jump ahead or back minutes randomly after pausing on its own) I’m not sure what happened between then and now but GoogleTV has all my favorite movies and I want to continue to use GoogleTV cause it’s not bad it just isn’t aging well or whatever and needs some TLC from the developers. I’m hopeful a patch or update will come soon.

by Cr8zyCatLadyT

This showed great detail in how abuse was perpetrated dialysis elected President Trump, Michael Flynn, Kesh Patel and others. It shows how rogue agencies mislead the American people in an attempt to overthrow our government. It showed the clear ties to media outlets and how information was and still is skewed to portray a proposed narrative over facts and truth. For many people, this documentary will fracture their belief of our government. It’s extremely difficult to hear how evil others are when their public image says otherwise. I thank God and the brave patriots for bringing this into light. We need them both as this world wakes up and learns the whole truth that caused America to fall from the inside out.

by Dna514

GoogleTV has been my go to for my digital libraries on iPad for the last few years, and I travel quite a lot. The offline feature is the biggest featurefor me.

A lot of people one starring GoogleTV because they cant purchase movies throughit must not understand that is Apples rules - their quest for monopoly removes your choices as a consumer. Use your web browser to purchase and the movie is in GoogleTV immediately.

Finally updated so GoogleTV fills the iPad Pro display!

by Djfksbssbsnfj

Would not let me just play the movie, you have to download it. Also would not download just using my data on my phone, I had to have my boyfriend turn on his WiFi hotspot, you have to download it using WiFi only. It took forever to download..then when I plugged it into my smart tv with my hdmi cable adapter from my iphone, it would not allow me to watch it while connected to my tv. Such a headache🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️ At this point I’m giving up and going to bed, I just hope the quality is good when I do get to watch it...on my tiny phone screen😒

by The_Bom.com

I just wanted to rent one movie online and this is one of the few options that pops up to do that. Turns out I have to download the movie using WiFi I don’t have access to. A message keeps popping up saying I can’t watch this movie offline without downloading. I do not have access to WiFi because I have unlimited data on my phone and don’t need WiFi for anything else because I have EXCELLENT service where I am at. The fact that I just paid to watch a movie just to find out that I can not watch that movie is COMPLETE BULL SH!T. I wish I had paid attention to the other reviews. There are so many other options out there. DO NOT DOWNLOAD GoogleTV.

by WizardRascal

Hey, GooglePlay, could you maybe NOT be a slow-assed, piece of crap?! I can’t watch a single thing because you keep buffering and losing connection every 2 to 6 minutes! And I KNOW it’s not the WiFi cuz every other app I use works just fine! It’s ONLY YOU that can’t seem to work properly! I’m paying money just to watch each movie and tv show (which isn’t the easiest thing to afford in this day and age), I’d at least like to be able to watch the whole thing without your stupid loading circle thing every 3 minutes! What is the point in having your app anywhere if it’s impossible to watch any content?! 🤬🤬🤬

by Lovethecatwalk

Every time ai rent a movie it stops playing. It does it several times saying “Error”. It gets very old starting a movie over and over and fast forwarding to where I was. Sometimes accidentally going too far and seeing ahead. When I went to report it, the “Describe your issue” feature was also broken and GoogleTV would close completely causing me again, to start over and over. Now I’m leaving feedback here. If this didn’t bug out, it would be the best app out there

Roku tv. Wifi and hardline both experienced the issue. I did all troubleshooting suggestions. Still bugged out.

by Nacho333

When I buy a movie that’s supposed to be 4K or at least better than regular HD, I’d expect to get what I pay for. Now I get to watch a somewhat HD version of Interstellar after purchasing the 4K version. Not to happy about that. I would think it wouldn’t matter that the devices I’ve tried watching them on are new (iPhone X and 2nd generation iPad Pro)! I guess I’ll just had to go back to punching video contact on iTunes. Thought google would treat me well, but I guess I was wrong.

Gave 2 stars because my movie was a bit cheaper than other platforms... I guess I see why now.

by N0iSEA

I wanted to rent a movie using google play’s service because I got 99 cent rental offer when I bought a new TV. The problem is, how do I watch the rental? Google play movies app is not available and does not cast to Apple TV, Xbox One, Playstation 4, or any device I can think of...

I am not really sure what the purpose of GoogleTV is. If its just to watch movies on your phone then it Is really useless because there are a ton of apps for that and you can even buy movies on the other apps. I cannot recommend GoogleTV until it explains why it should exist.

by GSotoR

I have GoogleTV in my Samsung Smart TV. I rented a movie and for some reason the movie freezes and my tv restarts by itself send me out of GoogleTV to main apps. I disconnected my tv for a moment. I logout from GoogleTV and login again. I don’t know what else to do. I can’t watch the movie. I gonna delete my account from GoogleTV. I will go with Apple TV. I never had this bad experience before with GoogleTV.

by 'Ru

Does the job, but it's really obvious that the video player gets less love than YouTube's. No way to quickly skip back or forward by 10/15 seconds and no fine scrubbing control means good luck trying to back up just enough to hear that one line you missed 5 seconds ago. There's also no custom volume indicator, so anytime you adjust the volume, the giant grey square default iOS overlay pops up and covers half the screen.

by D Kerr

I like the features overall, but I really want the option to zoom in a little more, and use all the pixels on my iPad (the same option Apple’s Video app has), instead of having a black strip at the top and bottom. I’d like this as a setting option, to either have a zoomed version (cutting off either the sides or top) or the original version.

by Utahn But Not Mormon

As an iPhone user, I was distraught I couldn’t chromecast movies I rented on iTunes. I made a wild guess and looked this up—finding it on a whim. I get to rent movies, watch them on my TV, and the curious cat who obsesses over the cast that I am is satisfied by GoogleTV showing me which stars are on screen at all times. Could only be happier if this was advertised better so I didn’t waste so much money on iTunes.