Google will open the TV platform to Android developers as part of the initiative, with a software developer's kit, the New York Times reports.

Several companies have already started using Android in devices made for TVs, including set-top boxes and 2D/3D graphics accelerators, designed around chip architecture. MIPS and its partners have done the development work on Android to tweak it for use in such devices.

Android was designed to work with Arm processing cores, the most popular cores in smartphones, but some companies have ported Android to other chip processing architectures, including MIPS and Intel's x86 processing architecture.