Google Hangouts is one of the most popular announcements at Google IO. The new messaging service unifies all of Google’s communication tools and brings the best of each. We are enjoying Google Hangouts on our phones and tablets, but if you want to take it a step further you can actually install it on your Google TV.

I can’t find the reason to, as I find it very inconvenient to send messages with my TV. The remote keyboards tend to slow me down more than my phone’s or tablet’s. But if you want to use Hangouts on the big screen, Google+ user Brock found out you can actually sideload it. He tested it with his VIZIO Co-Star and it seems to be working perfectly.

If you don’t know what sideloading is, or how to do it, you can go to our sideloading tutorial and learn all about it. You will also need the .apk file, which can be obtained by doing a quick Google search for “Google Hangouts apk”.

Please remember that sideloading is not the safest way to get your apps. All responsibility falls upon you if anything bad happens after doing this, so be careful! Find an .apk file from a reliable source if you decide to go forward with this procedure.

With that out of the way, enjoy and let us know how it went!

[Brock Costley]