We’ve heard loudly from both Roku and Amazon that their respective OTT device platforms each have around 40 million active users globally.
But what about the fast-rising Android TV platform? As Android Police first noticed, the YouTube app has been downloaded through the Google Play Store on Android TV 50 million times since Android TV was first introduced in 2015.
This is meaningful in that it gives some indicator as to how many active users are on the Android TV platform, something Google hasn’t revealed.
Google actively touts the proliferation of its Android mobile platform—the company said at its I/O developers conference last year that there were 2.5 billion active Android mobile devices at the time. But Google doesn’t seem to get behind the OTT iteration of the Android brand in quite the same way.
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The marketing energy for Android TV is focused on vendor and pay TV operator partners. In March, Google said that more than 160 operators were offering iteration Android TV in their video systems.
As for the YouTube download number, it comes directly from Google and it’s a meaningful indicator of how many active YouTube accounts have been set up via Android TV, not how many individual device downloads or updates have been conducted via the platform.
As Android Police noted, it would be more useful if there were metrics on another Android TV-enabled app to triangulate against—the next most popular downloaded app through Android TV is the Chromecast app, which has been downloaded more than 10 million times. But Google doesn’t offer any signpost in-between 10 million and 50 million.
