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Android TV, the smart TV platform created and maintained for Google, has had a bit of an identity crisis. When users visited androidtv.com, they found a celebrity video site.
If you go earlier, from before Android TV was announced, the site was used briefly as a different video hosting website from Bionic Studios.
What this means is that users who are interested in learning more about Android TV could easily end up finding the wrong website and not getting the information that they want. Google tried to obtain the domain in 2014, but they did not own the trademark at that point and the dispute happened before Android TV was officially announced (at the time, it was Google TV).
This changed over the weekend, when the domain was transferred to Google. It’s not clear whether this was accomplished through a legal case or if Google decided to purchase the domain from the previous owner. Either way, the site is currently not available at all. If Google did purchase the domain, they’ll likely add a redirect to another landing page they already have developed. This may be happening over the next day as DNS servers around the world refresh.
The registrar of the domain is MarkMonitor, a company who specializes in Internet brand protection. They were likely contracted by Google to negotiate the domain transfer. It was completed on Friday the 6th and it was only today that people started noticing the site was no longer available.
Google seems committed to the brand, finally obtaining the domain after two years, and they have an easy-to-remember domain to use just before Google I/O in a fortnight.
Nick Felker
Nick Felker is a student Electrical & Computer Engineering student at Rowan University (C/O 2017) and the student IEEE webmaster. When he's not studying, he is a software developer for the web and Android (Felker Tech). He has several open source projects on GitHub (http://github.com/fleker) Devices: Moto G-2013 Moto G-2015, Moto 360, Google ADT-1, Nexus 7-2013 (x2), Lenovo Laptop, Custom Desktop. Although he was an intern at Google, the content of this blog is entirely independent and his own thoughts.
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