Fall asleep while binge-watching? This Google TV feature might be for you (APK teardown)

Some streaming services, like Netflix, offer a pop-up to check if you’re still watching a series. This is especially handy if you’ve fallen asleep. Now, we’ve discovered that Google TV itself could get a similar prompt.

We dug into a recent version of the Google TV Home app for the Google TV platform (version 1.0.815784074-735113) and discovered the platform could soon check if you’re still watching TV. The strings mention a few snippets of text, seen below.

• Just checking in. This channel will stop playing because you haven’t used the remote in a while
• Are you still watching?
• Keep watching

This is a pretty smart feature, although it’s unclear how long the platform will take to check in with you. The first text snippet above also mentions that the “channel will stop playing.” In other words, Google TV might not enter sleep mode immediately. However, the platform does dip into sleep mode after a while if you’re not playing any media or interacting with it. So it stands to reason that if your current channel stops playing via this new feature, your Google TV device will eventually go to sleep anyway.

Furthermore, the snippet’s reference to a “channel” suggests that this feature might not apply to all video content. But we’ll need to wait for more info to confirm this.