Like Chromecast, Android TV-enabled set-top boxes and smart TVs will now gain the ability to screencast, or being able to “cast” something you’re watching on your phone to your TV set — no dongle required. There’s also the option of using an Android Wear-powered smart watch as a replacement remote, which is something we’ve not seen up until now.

Google seems to be putting a heavy emphasis on making search and navigation better, which is usually the most frustrating thing about interacting with software on a television set. Of course, I recall search being one of the big selling points the last few times the company demoed a new version of Google TV and was mostly unimpressed. At least with this version we have several different options for navigating through content, including smartphones, wearable devices, and voice search.

But as Google learned when it initially debuted Google TV years ago, to make the search function useful you need access to content. That said, Android TV features apps from Netflix, YouTube, and content purchased from the Google Play store. There’s also support for live TV, casting mobile games to your television screen, and a library of reference information about movie and TV shows like Amazon’s X-Ray feature for its Fire devices.

Also, Google will continue teaming up with hardware makers as it previously did with its Google TV operating system, including Sony, which apparently decided to integrate Android TV into its entire line of smart TVs.

(I would love to see a Samsung Android TV ....)

Samsung conspicuously missing:

http://qz.com/226263/googles-new-android-tv-platform-is-missing-samsung/

Yeah, hello?!  "Samsung represented more than half of Google’s 759 million Android phone sales last year, according to Gartner."

"Meanwhile, the first sentence of Brad Stone’s recent Businessweek profile of Google executive Sundar Pichai starts a story about how a Samsung announcement at the CES conference in January “enraged executives as Google.” The companies say they have patched things up: “We now work together more closely on user experience than we ever have before,” Pichai says in the piece. But it’s safe to assume Samsung’s relationship with Google will at least remain complicated."

It's definitely complicated. They need each other but they compete with each other.