Announcing Google TV: TV meets web. Web meets TV. If there’s one entertainment device that people know and love, it’s the television. In fact, 4 billion people across the world watch TV and the average American spends five hours per day in front of one*. Recently, however, an increasing amount of our entertainment experience is coming from our phones and computers. One reason is that these devices have something that the TV lacks: the web. With the web, finding and accessing interesting content is fast and often as easy as a search. So that got us thinking...what if we helped people experience the best of TV and the best of the web in one seamless experience?
Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. Google TV uses search to give you an easy and fast way to navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies. This is an incredibly exciting time — for TV watchers, for developers and for the entire TV ecosystem. Introducing Google TV. The Future of Google TV is.. Google TV is going to be very interesting.
It is far from a certainty that it will be more than Apple TV in terms of consumer sales. From a first glance the Marketplace is the most important and interesting element of the announcement. As a development platform, Android creates the potential for untold unique and interesting applications that could capture users imagination. Early on, I don’t think TV oriented apps will have the most impact. If I understood the announcement, in the beginning of 2011, there will be an Android Marketplace. The money and the opportunity won’t be in TV apps. The Google TV box could be a very cool and hopefully inexpensive gaming console. What about TV ? The success of Google TV will come down to one thing….PageRank. If you search for “House” on your Google TV and it returns a Youtube Video of some kid doing a parody of the Fox tv show House, you can bet the shit is going to hit the fan. Google TV: Five Burning Questions - PCWorld.
Google, Intel, and Sony are reportedly banding together to produce a Web content platform for your living room called Google TV. The new platform would reportedly be available as a set-top box or as part of a Web-capable television. Google TV would be based on Google's mobile operating system, Android, and would also include a version of the Chrome browser for using Web applications like Twitter or Picasa, Google's online photo sharing and storage service, according to The New York Times. The whole idea behind Google TV, the Times reports, is to create smartphone-like applications that make using the Web on your television as easy as changing the channel.
Google hopes to encourage third-party developers to create apps for Google TV with the same enthusiasm they have for creating Android smartphone apps. In the coming months, Google will provide an application development toolkit for Google TV, and the Times says we could see Google TV-related products as early as this summer. What does Google TV do for Sony? | Technology | Los Angeles Time.
Quick, which company is bigger: Google or Sony? If you answered Google, you'd be wrong -- at least when it comes to sales. Google pulled in $23.7 billion in revenue last year compared with Sony's $77.6 billion. But if one judges it by the amount of press generated by Thursday's announcement that Sony would be the first to come out with a television set incorporating the Google TV platform, the reverse is true.
News hits generated by a (Google) search for "Sony Internet TV" yielded 2,190 stories in the last 24 hours, whereas "Google TV" came up with 5,300 results. So what does the Japanese consumer electronics giant get from the alliance, if not press? 1. 2. "That’s what Google does with everyone,” he said. 3. "Software plays an increasingly important role in devices, but it's not Sony's forte," Gaw said. For now, that leg up is coming from Google. -- Alex Pham. The Unanswered Questions About Google TV. Murphy was in the room when Google unveiled its Google TV platform at its I/O developer conference today.
The demo was plagued with numerous problems, with remote controls losing sync and questionable content showing up on the TV feeds used to demonstrate Google TVs integration of the Web and the TV. Those snags turned the keynote, which was also used for a much smoother presentation of the new Android 2.2 version, into a three-hour long marathon session, and Best Buy’s CEO Brian Dunn had a hard time sounding convincing when he said he wanted a Google TV device “right now.”
However, technical hiccups weren’t the only issues that made the Google TV pitch sound less than ready for prime time. Google also made no mention at all of its new WebM initiative that was announced yesterday, which includes open sourcing its VP8 video codec. And in the inverse, Intel is powering all of the Google TV devices announced on stage today, but the chip maker was notably absent from the WebM announcement. Google TV - so what? It's all about the content... I can't get excited by Google TV because no matter how fine the box is, no matter how great the wired and wireless connectivity, or the user interface, at the end of the day it's all about the content. Who controls the content? It's the distributors. It's the major TV and cable channels. Take a look at what happened at Hulu, the Comedy Channel pulled its popular The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. There's still plenty of content on Hulu, but it's long tail stuff, old reruns of once popular shows, etc.
You can now watch HBO online, but only if you are a cable TV subscriber. The distributors control what you can and cannot watch online. This is why Apple has described Apple TV as a "hobby" because its a limited platform, its limited to what you have on your computer or that can be downloaded from iTunes. Will things change? But that would be incredibly disruptive since we would only pay for what we wanted and nothing else.
Pick-and-watch would dramatically lower our bills.