Seemingly bored with its quest for total domination of the personal computer and smartphone, Google just announced its new and upcoming service called Google TV. Television is a huge ad market with 4 billion users around the globe using it actively and Google plans to revolutionize it.
The concept behind Google TV is to merge the web with your TV so you can enjoy all those videos available online on the largest and best screen in your home – the one of your TV set. Google have partnered with Sony and Logitech on this one. Sony have prepared the world’s first Google TV lineup. That should hit the US market this fall. The lineup includes both a standalone TV model and set top box-type unit incorporating a Blu-ray Disc drive.
Google’s other partners Logitech have been working on a companion box that brings Google TV to existing HDTV home entertainment systems. It should be compatible with any brand of HDTV currently available.
The final notable member at the Google party is Intel, who will be providing the CPUs to power all that hardware. Wait, does that mean there’s an Atom inside that Sony Bravia? Cool!
And as tradition goes with Google-inspired devices, Google TV interface is search-based. Those devices will come with the Chrome web browser and will support Flash 10.1 so almost all kinds of web video will be available for direct consumption. Since Google TV is Android-based you will also be able to use apps from the Android market plus you Android smartphone can be used to remotely control the receiver (and even do voice searches).
Somehow I’m not overly excited about the whole thing and even if I give it a try some day, I probably won’t be canceling my cable subscription any time soon. Internet is already full of nice TV shows, TV series and what-not, but I doubt that all the local TV content I currently follow will be available through the Google TV searchbox. Like ever! But time will tell.
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