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. It will
be in gaming and social apps. The low-hanging fruit will be in taking
apps that work on Facebook and iPhone/iPad and moving them (if they
haven’t already) to the Android platform and upsizing them to take
advantage of working on a big screen.
The Google TV box could be a very cool and hopefully inexpensive
gaming console. That is where the money will be.
What about TV?
The success of Google TV will come down to one thing – PageRank. Can
you imagine the white hat and black hat SEO battles that will take place
as video content providers try to get to the top of the TV Search
Listings on Google TV? Like Google said, there are four billion TVs and
growing and the US TV Ad market is $70 BILLION. There is a lot at stake
if Google TV takes off. How Google does its PageRank for this product
will have a bigger impact on the success of the product in the TV
market than anything else it does.
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.
Not that Fox or any big media company
will sue Google. I don’t think they will. What will happen is that they
will “turn off” the Google TV Chrome Browser, just as they did to Boxee.
They will fight and possibly sue over what meta data is used to
determine search results. It will be a mess.
That would kill the
product because if it doesn’t work with the TV shows you want to watch,
why buy it?
On the flip side, if the best Google offers users is what they showed
in today’s demo, returning five or fewer results from a search with
content from the cable/sat provider showing first and possibly consuming
all five results, every internet content creator is going to scream loud
and long at Google for putting them at a disadvantage. No one is going
to be able to find your video if you show traditional TV shows first and
don’t show more than five results. They aren’t going to be satisfied with
referrals or Google suggestions as their only access to Google TV users.
They are going to claim that this is all just a ruse to get them to
advertise and that Google sold out to big media.
Even if Google lets the user decide how to rank results, it creates
too much risk for TV content providers and their distributors. More
mess.
On the other other side, if traditional TV makes it to the top,
Google TV is the best thing to ever happen to cable, satellite and telco TV providers. Why ? Google just solved their biggest problems,
their user interface and programming guide. Not only that, if Google TV
is what big content providers and distributors consider to be a good
partner, they just off loaded much of the future R&D for the set-top
box to Google and its partners and developers. Should cable and
companies adopt Android on their set top boxes ? They will watch and
decide. Even better for the TV Providers, maximum utility from the
Google TV comes from having a TV subscription. They may actually gain
subscribers as a result of this product. Which is exactly why Charlie
Ergen had Dish Network participate. It’s win-win-win for Dish Network
Google TV isn’t the answer. It’s the question. I’m sure Apple,
Microsoft and even Facebook have an opinion on the announcement. Their
response will be even more interesting.
The Future of TV is… TV. But Google sure sped up the timeline
today.