Google Dives Into TV

Web-Centric Platform Bows With Dish, Sony And Other Partners

By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 5/24/2010 12:01:00 AM

Google, the most powerful Internet company on the planet, has a lock on Web search. Its Android platform for phones is rampaging through the wireless industry. Next in its crosshairs: television.

Google — in one of the most ambitious efforts ever to marry the TV with the Internet — last week detailed an initiative to create a new class of Web-savvy products and services for television sets with partners including Dish Network, Sony Electronics, Best Buy, Logitech and Intel.

The Internet search giant’s Google TV project comprises a software “stack,” along with a hardware reference design, aimed at letting consumer-electronics makers, pay TV service providers, content owners, apps developers and others create new ways to search and discover content on the TV.

The Google TV platform is based on the company’s Android operating system and Chrome browser. The open-source software is designed to provide an integrated search across traditional TV programming and Web content, including the millions of clips on YouTube.

Essentially, Google’s idea is to strip away the guide from a subscriber’s current cable, satellite or telco provider and replace it with its own Internet-friendly interface.

“We’ve been waiting a long, long time for today,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at the company’s I/O developers conference. “It’s much harder to marry a 50-year-old technology with a brand-new technology than many of us in the new technology area thought.”

The real challenge for Google is whether ordinary TV viewers will find the Google TV promise of a richer video experience compelling enough to hook up an additional device to their television sets, said Jonathan Hurd, director at Altman Vilandrie & Co., a Boston-based media and technology consulting firm.

“The value-added of those devices for your average consumer is low in comparison to just accessing some of these services on my PC,” Hurd said.

But Dish Network, for one, claims that bringing the Web into a tighter embrace with the TV will give it a competitive leg up. The company has an “exclusive relationship” in the satellite-TV category to offer Google TV features to subscribers. This fall, the satellite operator plans to integrate support for the Google TV software in all its HD DVR receivers, to let users connect devices via an HDMI cable.

“We always felt good business is giving our customers what they want, or what they may not know they want,” Charlie Ergen, Dish’s chairman and CEO, said at the Google event.

For other providers, at least initially, Google TV devices will connect using an HDMI cable and will control a cable, satellite or telco set-top box using a separate “IR blaster.” The Google boxes will use Wi-Fi to communicate with input devices, such as keyboards and remote controls.

With Dish, Google developed an Internet protocol that will talk to the operator’s HD DVRs to provide a higher level of integration — for example, to let users set DVR recordings from the Google guide.

Dish and Google, which also have a deal for Google to sell Dish’s local ad inventory, said they began working together more than a year ago. The companies beta-tested the technology with more than 400 of their employees, and feedback from that trial was used to develop Google TV.

Rishi Chandra, group product manager for Google TV, said at the I/O conference that most existing approaches to bringing Web content to the television have failed for three reasons: They try to “dumb down” the Web for TV; they’re closed; or they don’t integrate traditional TV with the Web.

“What Google TV does is take the best of what TV offers today and the best of what the Web offers today,” he said.

Google TV has already integrated with Amazon’s video-on-demand service and Netflix’s Internet-streaming feature. “For a user, it doesn’t matter where I get my content,” Chandra said. “The Web becomes a natural extension of the TV itself.”

Among the demos Google staged: an Android mobile phone with voice recognition paired with a Google TV device. When the presenter spoke “Good Morning America” into the phone, the system tuned to the live TV show. The company also showed off the ability to push YouTube clips to the TV using an Android device.

In addition, Google execs previewed “You- Tube Lean-Back,” a personalized version of the service for Google TV that plays a continuous video stream based on a user’s interests or keywords.

BOX BUDDIES

Google TV’s initial partners:

Dish Network: Will upgrade HD DVRs to connect with Google TV devices
Sony: Plans to introduce a Google-enabled “Sony Internet TV,” featuring both a standalone TV model and set-top box-type unit incorporating a Blu-ray Disc drive, in the fall of 2010
Logitech: Expects to ship a Google TV controller and keyboard in 2010
Best Buy: To carry Google TV devices at retail
Intel: Atom CE4100 microprocessors will be used by both Sony and Logitech
Adobe Systems: Flash 10.1 is incorporated into the Google TV platform
SOURCE: Google