Google and Reliance-backed consumer internet company Glance has launched Glance TV – a live, interactive content platform for the home screen or ‘screen zero’ of Android smart TVs.

With live content and real-time on-screen interactions for users, Glance TV is aiming to completely transform the way people experience television.

Glance TV aims to be present on approximately 30 percent of all smart TVs in India soon. The company plans to make Glance TV available globally and also intends to develop the same for other smart TV operating systems.

Television viewing so far has been a passive way to spend time, with no way for viewers to express their reactions or interact with the content. In a world consumed by social media, television has remained at best a family experience due to the absence of social capabilities.

Glance TV with its programming, personalization and strong social elements helps users break out of this passive, limited, and isolated viewing experience, and become a part of the shows they watch, the company said in a statement.

Glance TV users can interact directly in real-time with their favorite stars on their television home screens. They can attend personalized fitness training sessions, watch interactive cooking shows with celebrity chefs, or enjoy sports in community watch-along that replicate immersive, stadium-like atmospheres.

Within shows, users can interact and shape the direction of the content through live comments, reactions, and polls. Using QR codes on live TV, users can buy tickets for movies and events, shop lives, and even get their social media posts featured on Glance TV streams.

Glance TV will offer off-beat, personalized snackable content of 5-20 minutes duration, across categories such as sports, entertainment, infotainment, e-sports, current affairs, lifestyle, food, and fitness, unlike standardized long-form TV shows. It has partnered with major content providers that include Zee5, Epic On, and Docubay to provide users fresh, personalized, and premium content every day.

The company said the launch of Glance TV is a major milestone for Glance, which has revolutionized content consumption on smartphones by bringing Live, interactive content to the mobile lock screen. Launched in 2019, Glance is now one of the world’s largest mobile lock screen platforms with over 200 million active users.

Commenting on the launch, Piyush Shah, co-founder of InMobi Group and president and COO of Glance, said, “Glance has reimagined the lock screen of smartphones into a live screen for personalized, LIVE content. With Glance TV, we want to redefine television experiences just as we did with smartphones. This is a TV in a way that has never been seen before and is a true innovation that extends the Live experience that Glance delivers on lock screens to television home screens.”

“With Glance TV, our intention is to remove the age-old connotation of TV being an idle way to pass time and change the perception of TV as the ‘idiot box,” said Manish Gupta, Senior Vice President, and GM, Glance. “Glance TV gives users the experience where they can be active while watching TV and can express themselves directly on the big screen, within virtual communities of fellow users.”

In February this year, Jio Platforms, the subsidiary of Reliance Industries (RIL), invested $200 million in Glance, in a series D funding round. Apart from this, the start-up also entered into a partnership with Reliance Retail that aims to provide Glance’s ‘lock-screen platform’ on JioPhone Next smartphones.

With this round, Glance’s valuation rose to $2 billion. A glance had raised $145 million in December of 2020 from Google and existing investor Mithril Capital, making it one of the fastest start-ups to reach the unicorn stage.