Google is putting Gemini's image and video generators on the television. The company said on Wednesday that Google TV will gain a new Create button inside its Gemini tab, giving viewers voice-driven access to Nano Banana for image editing and Veo for video clips. The features roll out first on Gemini-enabled TCL sets in the US, with wider device support promised later.
Alongside the generative tools, Google is adding a 'Short videos for you' row to the Google TV home screen, seeded with YouTube Shorts. Google Photos on the TV is also getting a Gemini-powered search bar, a Remix feature that restyles photos as watercolor or oil painting, and Dynamic Slideshows with animated layouts and frames.
The pitch is the living room as a shared canvas. Nano Banana, Google's image model, lets users swap outfits, change backgrounds, or build new scenes from a spoken prompt. Google's own example copy leans into the gag-reel use case, suggesting viewers ask the AI to make 'my dad wear a ridiculous outfit' to get a laugh from family and friends.
Key facts
- 01Google announced the Google TV update on Wednesday, adding a Create button inside the Gemini tab.
- 02Nano Banana and Veo are rolling out first on Gemini-enabled TCL TVs in the US, with broader device support to follow.
- 03Google Photos on Google TV gains Gemini search, a Remix feature for artistic styles, and Dynamic Slideshows.
- 04A new 'Short videos for you' row will surface YouTube Shorts on the Google TV home screen.
- 05Instagram brought its TV app to Google TV devices in the US earlier this year.
Veo handles motion. The model can generate clips from scratch or animate stills based on a description, with Google offering 'make my grandfather moonwalk in space' as a sample prompt. The shift moves Veo from a creator-tool curiosity into a casual party feature aimed at the average TCL buyer.
“Google is pitching the living-room version of Nano Banana as a party trick, with sample prompts like asking the AI to make 'my dad wear a ridiculous outfit' to get a laugh from family and friends.”— Jaeden Schafer
Google Photos is the more practical addition. Gemini search lets viewers pull up a specific vacation or birthday without scrolling through years of camera roll, and results land in a browsable grid that can launch into a slideshow. Selecting Google Photos in the screensaver settings now turns any album into a TV-ready Dynamic Slideshow with animated treatments.
The Shorts row arrives at an awkward moment. YouTube recently added an option to hide Shorts on mobile, a tacit acknowledgement that not every viewer wants the vertical-video feed forced into their experience. Google hinted the TV row could eventually pull from other sources, which would matter given that Instagram already expanded its TV app to Google TV devices in the US earlier this year.
TCL is the launch partner for the Gemini features, which is consistent with Google's pattern of using a single hardware brand to seed Gemini distribution before extending it across the broader Google TV ecosystem. The company has not said when other manufacturers will get the Create button or whether the Veo and Nano Banana endpoints on TV will match the quotas available in the Gemini app.
There are reasons to be cautious about how often viewers will actually use any of this. Generative image and video tools have struggled to find sticky behaviors outside content creators and meme-makers, and the TV remote is a worse input device than a phone for the kind of iterative prompting these models reward. Voice helps, but Google has spent a decade trying to make TV voice search feel natural and the results have been uneven.
There is also the content-moderation question. Putting Veo on a screen that the whole household watches raises a different bar for what the model will and won't generate, especially when the prompts come from kids and the output plays at full size in front of guests. Google has not detailed how the TV version of Nano Banana and Veo will handle the safety filters that already constrain the mobile apps.
For Google, the move fits a broader effort to make Gemini the default surface across every screen it ships. Search, Android, Photos, Workspace and now the television all route through the same brand, which gives the company a distribution edge that OpenAI and Anthropic cannot match on consumer hardware. Whether anyone actually wants to generate moonwalking grandfathers from the couch is a separate question, and one Google will get a fast answer to once the feature lands on TCL sets.
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