For millions of Android users in Asia, glancing at their phones doesn’t just reveal the usual clock against the background of a favorite vacation spot or the family pet. Instead, it’s a collection of news headlines, weather conditions, or sports scores, interspersed with ads.
That experience, known as Glance, made its way to U.S. Android handsets in 2024 and was greeted by what could be diplomatically described as a lukewarm reception.
“It doesn’t add anything of real value, and it also just looks bad,” wrote our Motorola Moto G reviewer after spending time with Glance.
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Glance’s creator (a Google-backed company that goes by the same name) either didn’t read our review, or, more likely, wasn’t bothered by it, because its president and COO Piyush Shah invited me to see a preview of the company’s next big idea, while I was at CES 2025: Glance is coming to our TVs.
During my 30-minute briefing (which turned into an hour), Shah and his team showed me their vision of TV’s future and you may not be surprised to learn that it looks a lot like Glance on a phone lock screen.
“It’s a new experience that transforms idle, ambient TV screens into dynamic, AI-powered smart surfaces that deliver live, personalized content when the TV is not in active use.” That’s the official description for GlanceTV, a set of visuals that take over your screen when you’d normally see a screensaver.
And sure enough, during my demo, that’s exactly what I saw: a carousel of enticing news headlines with accompanying images, supplemented with a widget that offered a persistent display of major league sports scores, and a clock.
You might choose to leave your TV on all the time.
Shah says Glance’s partnerships with hundreds of content providers will drive the content we see. There are no plans to scrape content from the web to supplement those deals. Most of the time, when a headline is accompanied by an image, the image will come from the same source. However, he did note that on occasions when a provider hasn’t included an image, the GlanceTV platform will use generative AI to create one.
The demo didn’t include any ads, but it did have something far more compelling, and a little unsettling.
With my permission, Shah uploaded a photo of my face into the GlanceTV platform. A cloud-based generative AI model then inserted my likeness, wearing casual outfits, into a variety of Instagram-worthy locations. The resemblance was uncanny — except for my AI doppelganger’s unerring sense of how to pose for the camera.
You’ve probably guessed the point: Each image is a shoppable outfit that can be ordered with a click of the remote. I dislike shopping for clothes. The time, the crowds, the salespeople (sorry) — no thanks. But I am exactly vain enough that seeing an idealized version of myself looking good in a set of clothes might be all it takes to get me to buy.
I was also struck by how easy it was to get sucked into GlanceTV’s swirl of content. It reminded me of the screens you sometimes see in elevators, or while waiting in a doctor’s office — the ones you end up staring at simply because they’re there.
This highlights the biggest difference between Glance’s mobile and TV experiences. Our phones are tools — digital swiss army knives that run much of our lives. For most folks, lock screen notifications are like a peephole into the apps we rely on. And when we aren’t checking that screen, our phones are either actively in use or shoved in a pocket or purse.
In other words, it’s valuable real estate that already serves a purpose. TVs are different. Except for gaming, they’re for passive content consumption. When a show ends or we’ve been distracted by our smaller screens while looking for something else to watch, we don’t mind when they shift into screensaver mode.
Shah hopes that GlanceTV’s mix of personalized content will be so enticing — so watchable — you might choose to leave your TV on all the time.
Whether you end up with GlanceTV on your TV, set-top box or any other TV-attached device will depend on the manufacturer. Like Glance’s mobile experience, GlanceTV can’t be downloaded and installed from an app store. It needs to be embedded in a device’s operating system. Some existing devices may receive Glance TV via a software update, but new devices are likely to be the main way GlanceTV enters our lives.
If I were to place a bet, I’d say the odds of Glance striking a deal with Apple are zero. If anyone is going to extract value from idle time on an Apple TV, it will be Apple itself.
Still, few manufacturers have Apple’s combination of deep pockets and an obsessive control over user experience. Given the possibility of monetizing screentime that would otherwise be lost to a screensaver, I expect Glance won’t have much trouble getting other companies to give it the access it needs. One only needs to look at Roku and Amazon’s business models for their streaming devices to see that GlanceTV is a good fit.
In fact, just before CES, the company announced its first GlanceTV integration with India’s Airtel. The experience is now turned on by default for over one million Airtel Xstream set-top box devices, and the partnership expects this to grow to four million devices by June 2025.
If the GlanceTV concept makes you uncomfortable, you can disable it on your device — much as you can with Glance on Android phones. But I have a feeling GlanceTV’s idle-time screen show will prove much more popular than its lock screen experience.