Google TV has now added a new Report feature to the long-press menu. The new safety tool is designed to make it easier for households to report and hide unsuitable content, ensuring inappropriate titles no longer surface as recommendations across the entire Google TV interface.
What You Need to Know
- Google TV’s newly-added Report feature allow users to proactively hide inappropriate content.
- The new feature can be accessed directly from the long-press menu.
- Reported titles can be managed and even unreported through the new Reported Items section in Settings.
Google TV’s recommendations can be pretty useful, and with the ability to assign different profiles to different household members, each person should only see recommendations tailored to them.
However, the recommendations engine isn’t perfect and there are times when users might see recommendations that are unsuitable. This is where the new Report feature comes in.
Essentially, the new feature gives homes the ability to manually take control of these unwanted recommendations by hiding them from view.
If it is something that’s likely to be inappropriate to all users, including titles that violate Google’s policies, Google may use these reports to completely remove titles from the platform.
Using Google TV’s New Report Tool
For those interested in giving the new safety feature a try, it is fairly simple to use. Once encountering an unsuitable title (for example, an inappropriate movie or series), the user just needs to navigate to the title’s card and long-press the Select button.
This will then bring up an existing menu that includes options like Add to watchlist, Like and View details. Users will now find the new Report option at the very bottom of this list.
Clicking on Report will then provide the user with the option of explaining what exactly they find unsuitable about the title. Choices include Image, Title, Content of the movie/show and Other.
After selecting a reason, the user just needs to click on Confirm to report the unsuitable title. Once a title has been reported, it will immediately disappear from the Google TV row where it was first encountered.
Google TV will also work behind the scenes to suppress the title across the entire device, ensuring it doesn’t surface again in any of the other recommendation rows.
In situations where a title is mistakenly reported, all reported items can be viewed, managed, and even un-reported again by heading to the Settings menu and then down to Reported Items.
Google TV Users Can’t Report All Titles Yet
While the new feature seems to be widely available, there are some limitations that Google TV users will need to be aware of.
Firstly, the ability to report an item currently only works with on-demand titles, likes movies and shows. It does not yet work with Live TV, YouTube, or Sports recommendations.
Secondly, although reporting an item will result in Google TV actively avoiding displaying the title in recommendations rows throughout the user interface, reported titles will still show up in search results when the title matches the user’s search words.
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