Google sure seems to be testing or developing a content hub under the name Kaleidoscope, per a dormant landing page that can be seen on Google’s developers browser.
Spotted by Chrome Story at chrome://kaleidoscope/ with Chrome Canary, Kaleidoscope — as it appears to be called — greets visitors with the tagline: “All your shows in one place.” Kaleidoscope, it seems, would allow users to “see all your favourite shows in one place, no matter where they’re hosted.” When Gizmodo visited the landing page on Thursday afternoon, nothing appeared below a prompt to choose “the providers you use.” However in screenshots shared by Chrome Story, icons for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ appeared below.
Clicking a bottom-right “Yes I’m in” button from the landing page took us to a second page titled “Continue watching across all your devices.” However, again clicking “Yes I’m in” dropped us off at a dead end. That page read: “Chrome Kaleidoscope is not currently available for your account. If you are a Googler check out go/kaleidoscope-not-available for more information.” Womp. Womp.
Google did not immediately return a request for comment about the product.
What this seems like is either something along what Plex wants to be — which is just an everything host and aggregator for content — or something more like Apple TV or Prime Video, through which you can stream third-party services. With little to actually look at, it’s tough to say how it would actually work — though it would be extremely tight for Chrome users to be able pull up a window that would essentially take the guesswork out of content juggling across multiple services.
Do you know anything about Chrome Kaleidoscope? Reach out to the author at ckeck@gizmodo.com or reach us anonymously via Gizmodo’s Secure Drop.