People have been working on interactive/internet-connected TV products for years and thinking about the sort of services you can offer to TV viewers when you have a fast back channel. Even I was doing this stuff different start-ups and one big cable company in the late 90's
For example, think about what you can build when you know what a lot of people are watching in real time, or if you know what your friends are watching. Or to get feedback from your viewers (You think CNN and every other live broadcaster's fascination with Twitter is bad? It's the tip of the iceberg!). Or you want viewers to respond to your adverts.
Which set top box you have plugged in to your TV will be at least as important as the battle for dominance in the mobile phone space.
And, more importantly: There's certainly the room for some scrappy young start ups to make huge amounts of money from Google and Apple TVs app stores.
Well, most of the core features (flash games, streaming video from websites, pay video services) are already implemented by my Nintendo Wii or Xbox 360. So it feels kinda ho hum.
Google is a late comer to this field. They have to play catch up before they really gain traction in the consumer market. And no, being able to tweet from my couch, using my TV (when I could just as easily tweet ANYWHERE using my mobile phone) is not a killer app.
My thing is, whatever happened to Google just launching things without announcing them? They still do it for features, but no longer for products. Maybe it's something you can't do with physical products because consumers might postpone their buying decisions for competitors until after the launch. Still, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I see us announcing things that are not even nearly done yet.
> Still, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I see us announcing things that are not even nearly done yet.
What? The blog post explains that devices running Google TV will go on sale this month. That is, within the next 27 days you will be able to buy a Google TV.
How is that "not even nearly done yet"? Dude, the product goes on sale in less than 27 days. It's probably done.
It was announced many months ago. I'm using this opportunity to talk about how unfortunate it is that we announced it so long ago and are only launching it now. I'm not saying this current announcement itself is a fail. :)
I'm not sure that's true (I'm not sure its not either) but in this case Google hasn't been very open to outside developers.
They have solutions for "optimizing your website for TV" but nothing on the dev page for developers but a coming soon. That and the fact that Android apps won't be available until 2011
They said it would be available in September. Now they say it will be available in October. To me this seems like vaporware, specifically to keep people from buying AppleTV. They still don't have any content deals setup. I haven't heard any big players other than Netflix, which is already available on any Bluray player made (practically).
Where is Hulu? Where is ESPN? These are the networks they need to beat Apple in this market, and they're conspicuously absent. Even Youtube is supposed to have TV rentals "really soon now," but I haven't heard much about that recently.
Why does it seem that the only thing Google can do now is say "me too" whenever Apple releases a new product?
Um, wasn't GoogleTV announced at Google I/O in may, way before AppleTV2 was announced? How do you introduce vaporware to block the sale of something that didn't exist yet?
1. Physical products probably do need early announcements. The new AppleTV launched recently. Knowing GoogleTV is on the way, I'm definitely going to wait and compare.
2. Control the announcement. Since they had to tell developers anyway (to get apps and websites optimized), it's better to announce it then leave to techcrunch, gizmodo, and all the other rumor mills.
I can understand that but in this case its just a timing thing. If this was a July launch they'd probably be more under wraps until closer to launch. But with the X-mas buying season coming up quick they need to get it onto consumer's radars earlier.
Nice to see Netflix, Pandora, and "more coming soon from Android Market", but beyond that the pickings feel a bit slim.
Is it surprising that Hulu Plus isn't on board? With Netflix and Amazon as part of the package, Google's not averse to additional subscription or a la carte pricing, and I've got to think that Hulu could have earned higher promotional placement than those time-filling CNBC knuckleheads.
Hasn't Hulu had a LOT of issues getting permission to be involved with anything designed to be displayed on a TV? They've blocked Boxee and several other similar offerings. Last I checked their content providers wanted it to be a "everything BUT TV" service.
Hulu's availability issues are entirely of its own making. The Hulu Plus strategy is explicitly about extending that reach, starting with iOS, Xbox, PS3, and the current-gen TiVo. They're already on TVs, in other words.
Roku just recently announced they'll be officially supporting Hulu Plus in the near future. I'm curious as to why Hulu would work with Roku on a service offering, but not with Boxee.
You have to discern between Hulu and Hulu Plus. Hulu plus is coming to Roku. Boxee scrapes Hulu's main site and passes on all of Hulu's content to its users.
Hulu+ okay on big screen, Hulu (regular) not so much.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Hulu plus on the Boxee box.
It's gonna be funny seeing Hulu block this thing. It'd be even funnier if Google added in a "Desktop compatibility toggle" to report the user agent as vanilla Chrome to force Hulu to show up.
Strange that out of all the TV makers Sony is a partner with Google on this. Google is only showing off media apps in the video but games are coming soon, so Sony will be selling Bravias with a built-in Playstation competitor.
I highly doubt that a TV with an embedded ARM processor running Android is any serious competitor to a state of the art game console with the ability to run 1080p 3D graphics, use seven controllers, and store massive amounts of game assets on Bluray disks. They don't even compare IMO. And yes, I have a PS3 and a Roku box and a TiVo HD...
I think Playstation is actually a separate company (SCEI) from Sony TVs. Although given the way Sony Music sabotaged the Walkman division, I wouldn't be surprised if SCEI tried to sabotage Google TV.
It's funny how people still refer to Google as a search-company.
Where I live, up in northern europe, in pretty much every single news story where google is mentioned they still say "the search giant", "the websearch company" etc. The same way they call(ed) Microsoft "the software giant".
edit: I don't think "search giant" or even "search" is or ever was an approprate tag for Google. It is and has always been an ad aggregating (adregator?) company who merely used (and now even more) the vast quantity of content on the web and the users desire to locate it as the underlying mechanism for enabling it's business.
Google might make money from advertising, yes. But, as far as the average person is concerned, Google means search.
Whether Google likes it or not, their name is synonymous with search. When someone says "Just Google it", they don't mean to go to your tv and start watching something. They don't mean to look at your phone and play a game. They mean to go to your computer, open a web browser and search for something.
>>Google might make money from advertising, yes. But, as far as the average person is concerned, Google means search.
Yes, exactly, precisely that is what I find funny.
Not in a "you average people, go read up on your google facts" or even in a way that I particularly care take a stand against/with. I just find it cosmically funny somehow.
If I may stretch it a tad; almost in a dystopian, dark comedic sense.
edit: and also, you say "average", in my above post I said news stories, that is, journalists. They really shouldn't be "average" in this context. If they are, then yeah sure, their readers will become.
Also, you could say the same thing about facebook. It's not a social network, it's an ad aggregating company who merely used the vast network of people for enabling it's business.
Also, magazines, newspapers, tv, etc.
Basically, it's a tautology for anyone running ads.
There's no connection. Live streaming will be driven by wide public availability, e.g., web browsers. It's not going to yoked to a specific piece of Android kit.
Okay, so Sony signed some papers with them and will be offering it right on the TV.
Will Samsung? Because that's the TV I have. Hulu and Amazon both support the new Samsung TVs. (Or the TVs support those services, depending on how you look at it.)
Are you aware of any cases where existing TVs gained significant new streaming features after the fact? This sort of integration is an inducement to buy, not an inducement to remain brand-loyal on your next TV purchase.
Not on your current TV. The current crop of Samsung devices don't have the processing power to run Google TV. I'm pretty sure the Sony Google TVs will be an upsell, unlike the current TV platforms the chipsets needed to run Google's platform are expensive I think you're going to need to pay for a "Google TV enabled" device, unlike the Yahoo widgets which you get for "free". This may change in the future but for now its not.
Current "Internet connected" Samsung TVs aren't cheap either; the difference to comparable basic models is in hundreds of Euros. I'm sure Sammy could get back the price of Intel CE4x00 SoC quite easily.
In those cases you're paying for a better TV not necessarily for the apps platform. You can also get a $250 Blu-Ray player with Samsung's app.
Samsung's approach is currently a walled garden - where they can subsidize the cost of the chips and support costs by doing revenue shares with the content providers. Google TV's flash enabled browser breaks this model which is another reason Samsung likely won't go there anytime soon.
There's a lot of stuff missing on the Apple TV that will be in the Google TV. There's a reason Logitech's box will be twice that. Its also fairly clear that one of Apple's main reason for the Apple TV is for users to buy content through iTunes for their TV so its not that clear if they are really making much on the apple tv itself or looking to make that up in content purchases.
EDIT: I should note however that thats not necessarily a good thing for Google. Both AppleTV and Roku feel that the happy zone for an over the top box is around $100. I kind of agree with this, since over $200 you start getting very close to the price of a PS3 or Xbox 360...
The big seller for me is Hulu, I mean right now I can use Netflix on the Wii and I can use Hulu with my laptop. Without Hulu or cable/satellite it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
I wonder how the boxee.tv team is feeling about this. Must be a little frustrating to work for years putting together such a great product and then see a major player come in like this.
I was just thinking the same thing. I love Boxee, but it's difficult to see where there will be room for them in this space once Apple and Google have carved it up between themselves.
Netflix streaming in consumer devices (game consoles, Tivo, Roku, AppleTV, iOS gear, various televisions and blu-ray players, etc) never depends on a web browser. There's no cursor, no mousing, and no typing except with a ouija-board interface or an optional peripheral.
I used it with Chrome yesterday just fine. Maybe your Chrome doesn't have Silverlight correctly installed, for the on-demand video? For the video that's what really matters, the browser is just a container at that point regardless of which browser it is.
Huh, Chrome works for me too, and that's a fairly new development, like the last month or two. Officially, Netflix streaming in a browser still only supports Firefox, Safari, and IE.
This seems really odd to me because I've been using Netflix with Chrome for at least a year now, and I didn't do anything special, just installed silverlight and it worked.
That is just another way of saying, "If you build it, they will come." Not exactly an axiom these days.