It seems that early adopters of Sony's Google TV devices may be blessed with a way to root their devices. The rooting process is a bit involved but it is a software only hack that works on the NSZ-GT1 Blu-ray player and the NSX-GT1 lineup of HDTVs.
The hack to root these Sony Google TV devices has been released by Zenofex and the GTV Hacker team. I wouldn't call it the most straight forward process but it does allow the user to bypass the content locks that many sites have for Google TV. This means Hulu Plus can be streamed through these devices after they are rooted.
If you want to do this to your device, you are going to need four USB flash drives (yes you read that correctly) each with 512MB of space or more. You'll also need a PC or Linux system, Mac OS X won't work, and a little bit of know-how because you'll need to spend some time in the command line to get this to work. The full process is detailed on the GTV Hacker wiki.
If you decide to put the time and effort into rooting your device it seems the payout is considerable. The most notable part is a modified Flash plugin that allows unsigned content to be streamed to the Google TV devices. This means you can get content from Hulu, NBC, CBS, ABC, and FOX. Apparently there is also support in there for NTFS drives on the device. More importantly this unsigned kernel will give developers permissions that allow them to create other tweaks for the system in the future.
It's worth noting that the rooted version of the operating system won't update automatically and it will void your warranty. The rooted version is based on Sony's latest Android 3.2 release and the guys behind the hack claim it is very easy to restore the system to stock settings should you decide you aren't thrilled with the modified software.
Do any of you have one of Sony's Google TV devices? Are you interested in gaining root access so that you can stream more stuff to your box? Let us know what you think of this and if you intend to try it out by leaving us a comment.
