Google’s vision for your living room television includes short-form vertical video. Earlier today, the company announced a wave of updates for Google TV, headlined by a dedicated “Short videos for you” row coming to the home screen this summer.
The new rollout will appear directly on the Google TV home screen, manifesting as a personalized feed of YouTube Shorts drawn from your watch history; no app launch required.
Can you disable the new YouTube Shorts row on Google TV?
Google says the feature will expand beyond Shorts over time, with Instagram Reels a likely future option. However, at the moment, only YouTube Shorts integration is officially confirmed. The rollout is limited to U.S. devices starting this summer.
What sounds concerning to Google TV users is that there’s no confirmed way to hide or disable the short-video row. Furthermore, Google hasn’t addressed how advertisements within the feed are handled, or whether they fall under parental controls.
To me, the integration sounds less about convenience and more about expanding the advertising territory. Placing a Shorts feed on the home screen puts ads directly in your living room, a space that has been traditionally dominated by broadcast and cable. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the absence of opt-out controls is a strategy, though.
What else is coming to Google TV?
Beyond that, Nano Banana (Google’s AI image generation platform) and Veo (AI video generation platform) are live on Gemini-enabled TCL Google TVs in the U.S., starting today. The tools will be accessible through a new Create button in the Gemini tab.
Google Photos also gets three new upgrades: Gemini-powered voice search to find specific pictures, a Remix feature that applies artistic styles like watercolor or oil painting to photos, and Dynamic Slideshows, which include animated screensavers built from any album. This particular feature is rolling out globally to eligible devices with at least 2GB of RAM.