Shobana Radhakrishnan, Google TV’s Senior Director of Engineering has won the Digital Entertainment Group’s (DEG) 2025 Hedy Lamarr Award for Innovation in Entertainment Technology.
In its ninth year, the Hedy Lamarr Award recognizes female executives in the fields of entertainment and technology who have made a significant contribution to the industry. Radhakrishnan will be presented DEG’s 2025 Hedy Lamarr Award at a ceremony in Los Angeles in fall, according to a media release.
Over a career spanning more than two decades, Radhakrishnan has been a technology visionary bringing AI-based innovation to many products.
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As the head of engineering at Google TV, she launched the first AI-driven innovation for TV OS in the history of Google, ushering in a new era of innovation with Gemini and AI on TV and setting a high standard for personalized recommendations for the entire industry with a multiplatform and multimodal vision.
Prior to Google, Radhakrishnan held various technical leadership roles at Roku, Mindflash Technologies, Yahoo and Netflix.
“DEG is proud to present the Hedy Lamarr Innovation Award for 2025 to Shobana Radhakrishnan of Google for her pioneering work with AI to provide consumers a state of the art experience with personalized recommendations in the Google TV OS,” said DEG President & CEO Amy Jo Smith. “In this year of explosive AI innovation, we honor her track record of important, practical and responsible use of the technology.”
“Hedy Lamarr inspired me throughout my career with the brave risk-taking and technical prowess she showed throughout her life. Her success empowered me to travel very diverse paths during my own career — moving across countries, constantly adapting, and overcoming many barriers to hypercharge teams and products in my pursuit of excellence. Most recently, at Google TV, that has meant leveraging AI to delight users across the globe,” said Radhakrishnan.
“Hedy Lamarr’s intelligence, creativity and innate ability to make big leaps continue to have a strong influence on my value system, driving innovation and technology forward. I feel very privileged and humbled to be presented the Hedy Lamarr award and am very thankful to DEG for this honor.”
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At Google TV Radhakrishnan leads next-generation TV product and research groups that have innovated using Gemini and AI on TV, according to her profile. She also led the multi-year initiative to bring Google search and recommendation algorithms to Google TV. She was responsible for bringing Android innovation such as virtual remote, fast pairing and GTV Connect to a one billion-user base with the Google TV app.
These have all served as important ecosystem elements not just for Google TV but have also served as benchmarks for the connected TV industry. Driving initiatives that not only directly influenced and impacted business outcomes at scale, but also transformed the industry at large, is in Radhakrishnan’s DNA.
At Netflix, she was the overall engineering lead for the launch of streaming’s first original series, “House of Cards.” In addition to this, she led architecturally complex migrations that helped Netflix expand globally. Following this, she worked on core platforms at Roku where she spearheaded a multi-year migration that was critical to core business success.
Radhakrishnan is passionate about diversity in STEM, inclusiveness in products, and has led Diversity and Inclusion initiatives across Roku, Google, Netflix and Yahoo, according to the release.