With Google TV, the company wants to marry the web with the living room television experience
Earlier today, Google gave an impressive demonstration of their vision for the future of the television experience that was marred only by Bluetooth connectivity issues.
The company plans to combine its video technology and TV partnerships to bring the web into the living room. From YouTube “lean back” (ie. living room view-friendly) sites like NBA.com to photo-sharing services like Flickr and Picassa, the number of sites on-board covered a broad swath of the web.
Google employees also tried to demo new features like Google translation on foreign TV and what appeared to be a pretty extensive “search” feature, but were constantly foiled by Bluetooth outages.
But will the Google brand be a hit with consumers in the television marketplace?
If Google’s namesake doesn’t carry the necessary brand power to entice mainstream consumers, its heavy-hitting partners in the marketplace just might.
As for the product itself, the company popular enlisted peripheral maker Logitech for a unit to bring GoogleTV to legacy HDTVs; for new TVs, Sony will integrate the hardware into its Blu-ray players and HDTVs. And while it wasn’t mentioned, a big subject of debate was whether Sony might integrate GoogleTV into its Cell processor-based PlayStation platform.
Intel was selected to provide the processor and graphics chip for the Android-powered TV, while Google hinted the ARM processors that power its smartphone line aren’t powerful enough (yet) to crank out 1080p video and surround audio.
Google could also brag about snagging a huge technology point of sale: Best Buy plans to distribute Google TV hardware in the U.S. Also, Dish networks, the fastest growing U.S. television provider, will include Google TV into its satellite TV product.
So in terms of partnerships, Google appears to have its bases covered, and as a result, the buzz at I/O is that this product could be big.
What wasn’t discussed though, was a financial model. We all know that Google does ads. (Lots of ads.) So it’s not unreasonable to imagine that GoogleTV could be a huge platform for serving targeted ads some time down the line.
Check the video below for Google’s overview.
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diTpeYoqAhc”]
