I am from China, sorry for my grammar mistake in English.
Recently I have explored Google TV's new interface and heard that Android TV will receive that shortly.
The transfer from the old interface to the new one is extremely dangerous for end users.
According to Google, the new user interface is more focused on content, but I don't think so.
Firstly, what you see on your home screen is completely controlled by Google.
Remember during the Google TV setup, it asked you to link your streaming account to Google in order to receive the recommendations in this "For you" tab, which means everything you see here is not pulled from the apps but pulled from the Google server. Google has complete control over what you can see and they got your highest attention once you turn on your TV.
Secondly, the gradual weakening of the concept "Apps"
As you can see in the new interface, Apps tab has been ranked second to the last, and on the home page, the apps are no longer on the top. Google want you to use their recommendation services rather than using your apps individually. But, Smart TVs are all about apps, which means end users should determine what they want, but not Google forcing users to watch the recommendations. I'm not saying that Google will cut the App feature and preventing users from accessing them, but based on my guesses and my experiences using some Chinese TV ecosystems, the concept of Apps will be weakened until it disappears. For now, if you want to install apps outside Play store, it has been much more difficult since the release of the new Chromecast.
The possible future of Google TV and Android TV
You may not know much about the Chinese TV market, but I think Google TV will go in the worst possible direction if we don't pay attention to this issue.
1. the disappear of "Apps"
Let me first show you something:
This picture above is the launcher of Xiaomi TV in China. Every corner of the home page is filled with ads from streaming platform, the "Apps" page is narrowed to that green box in the middle-left. Any of the tabs on the top is for ads and subscriptions. But the worse thing is Xiaomi does not allow you to replace the TV launcher. To me this looks really similar to Google TV, and the experience of this TV launcher is terrible.
2. ads before launching
Watch this video on Bilibili:
The experience using this TV must be terrible, I don't what my Google TV to be like that.
3. What if I want to skip the ads through an external TV box?
They will put the ads into the HDMI signal:
How to avoid that?
For now, you can go inside your Google TV settings and turn on App mode, that will disable all the content pushed to you from Google. But who knows what Google will do in the future, we will see.
At that time, I believe there will be people finding ways to disable them through settings, apps, adb, or even proxy, just like what everyone is doing in China to get rid of these ads. But that is difficult, not all the people knows these things. The only thing we can do is to have independent thinking, and be aware of the feature updates from Google to avoid being controlled by our TV or OS manufactures.
The most sad are the zealots in comments defending Google and after market addition of ads on our Android devices.
The arguments of type they aren't ads if they are useful and just ignore them dude are straight from fanboy land.
They mimick clearly Fire OS model and maybe on their Pixel phones they will include ads on lock screen as Fire OS tablets do... 😂
Google of 2021 isn't the same company of 2019. They are under major restructure. We can expect anything.
iOSfication of Android continues too. It's sad because Android had his design language and there is no need to mimick Apple at anything.