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Comment by sct202 | Hacker News Reader

Netflix is the last app that works on my Sony Google TV from 2011. The YouTube app shut off after like 2015, but 8 years later Netflix is still trucking.

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Funny that it has google in the name of the OS and a third party app was supported for longer...

Why don't these devices run Android? Pretty sure you can run YouTube on a 2011 Android release. That's not important to Sony, of course, but even for new hardware it seems easier to make it run Android and shovel your bloatware on it than to develop your own half-assed OS for each TV model.

Google TV is a super-mutated version of Android... Google turned their back on it in 2014 in favor of something that was closer to normal Android.

Youtube's required Android version is listed as varying depending on device on Google Play, but on apkmirror.com it says that the minimum version is Android 4.4+. That was released in 2013.

https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/youtube/youtube-14-...

That's for the latest version of YouTube, but I believe an old version of YouTube will still work fine with today's servers, at least for basic video watching (commenting etc. broke in the big Google plus debacle)

My mom still watch Netflix daily from my old Wii U I left home.

Every day with streaming still working is considered a win

Ahhh my 40" google TV was too big to haul across the country the most recent time I moved. Ended up in a dumpster. Really too bad.... That was a nice TV. Good picture quality.

On the bright side I bought a new TV and found, to my surprise, digital antenna works much much better now. I have two TVs, the flat screen from ~2010 gets 3 channels, the new one gets 30. They're connected to the same source.

> Ended up in a dumpster

Bummer. Put it on the side of the road and someone would have LOVED to take it.

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