Google’s working on a streaming hub called Kaleidoscope

(Pocket-lint) – It’s become more and more that as far as tech giants like Apple and Google are concerned, no pie is complete until they’ve got a finger in it. While Google’s had its own streaming platform in the form of Play TV & Movies for a while, it’s clearly looking to strengthen its hand on that front.

The team at Chrome Story somehow managed to catch a brief window during which users on Chrome Canary, the version of Chrome with more experimental features, could go to chrome://kaleidoscope/ to see what looked a lot like an early version of a one-stop streaming hub.

It appeared to let Chrome users link their streaming accounts in one place, including Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney Plus. Trying to connect them would take users to a page that said “Continue watching across all your devices”, with no further options or interactivity available.

It’s clear that this wasn’t a feature that was far along, given the lack of actual functionality, but it’s a really intriguing prospect nonetheless. The suggestion is that Google’s working out whether such a feature’s possible, letting it give you one place to go to find all the streaming content you have access to.

Of course, you’d have to suspect that if Amazon or Netflix were open to being hosted on the same single platform blended into one, that platform would likely already exist, but if anyone has the clout to bring them together you’d imagine it might be Google. 

9to5Google, meanwhile, have done some digging of their own and are of the opinion that the service is actually intended as a recommendations tool that could look at your likes and ratings for shows and movies across multiple platforms, rather than hosting the content itself, which does indeed feel more credible. 

Either way, we think it’s safe to assume we might not get a glimpse of Kaleidoscope again any time soon – the pages that Chrome Story accessed won’t load anymore, and that might just be the end of the matter.

Writing by Max Freeman-Mills.