The CEOs of Sony, Best Buy, Echostar, Adobe, and Logitech were on a panel moderated by Google CEO Eric Schmidt this afternoon to, as expected, introduce Google TV. Each discussed their plans for the product which, naturally, features a search bar on the home screen to find programs. That search will find both web and traditional television offerings (through your antenna, cable or satellite box) without scrolling through unwieldy on-screen TV directories.
Google TV is a platform that will also run applications written for Android phones and will include the Chrome Web browser. Plans are to add its own set of APIs early in 2011 and open the source code by that summer; developers can start work on Google TV projects to extend the service today. Available in the fall, it will initially be built into a Sony HD TV and a Blu-ray player or available through a set-top box made by Logitech and sold at Best Buy.
The effort is likely to face formidable challenges. Google must persuade television manufacturers other than Sony to use its software, and retailers other than the electronics chain Best Buy to sell the devices. And consumers have demonstrated little interest, so far, in connecting to the Web through their TVs.
What they have shown is price sensitivity, and the high-powered Intel Atom chips that will be at the heart of devices running Google TV are likely to add to their cost. Intel has spent billions of dollars developing those chips over the last few years in a high-stakes push to crack the market for consumer electronics.
The companies declined to discuss prices.
Are consumers really uninterested? Or has there been no easy option? I don’t really even know what Apple TV is, which is understandable since Apple itself said just last month that “it’s still a hobby” for the company. What I think I know is that I can’t watch traditional Television through it and I receive only a subset of the web.
I’ve had TiVo pretty much since day one and I’m a fan. But I’ve been able to carry the lifetime service I bought on the first day through to the Series 3 I have now. I may go to TiVo premier, but I’ll have to be enticed into it. That’s too bad because while TiVo has had plenty of problems it’s a fairly outstanding product which has served me well. That said, to set it up can easily take the better part of an afternoon. Google TV sounds far simpler to set up — plug your cable box and (at least 3MB/s) wireless broadband into it — and it’s a free service once you have the hardware.
So yes, consumers are price sensitive but Google’s promotional video (above) rings true: we’re watching video on computer screens, in part, because there’s not a low-cost, easy way to have it all on our large screens. If Google and its stable of CEOs can pull that off, consumers will go there. If they fail, consumers still win because Google has substantially ratcheted up the competition in an already crowded space (Apple TV, Boxee, PopBox, Roku TiVo and others).
One way or another, we’re going to get internet on our TVs. Possibly just as quickly as we moved from clunky tubes to sleek flat-screen TVs.
You can find me @jwindish, at my Public Notebook, or email me at joe-AT-joewindish-DOT-com.