News reports in the US are saying that despite Google TV being panned in the press, more and more TV manufacturers are signing up for the platform, including anticipated moves from Toshiba, Samsung and Vizio in time for January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Sales are thought to be slow and that was cited this week as the reason for Sony to cut $100 from its TV models which have Google TV built in. That sounds a bit harsh given that Sony is always cutting its models during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday rush to stimulate a stampede of buying.
A lot of people ask us, ‘Is Google TV going to happen?’ and while it can’t be 100% clear, there are a number of observations to be made and more work to be done on the product. Google gets a very clear 5 out of ten and a ‘must try harder sticker.’
Once Samsung joins the party to produce a TV set or two with Google TV functionality, then with Sony, Toshiba and Vizio it is one or two manufacturers off a clean sweep in the US TV market. It’s not on a wide variety of models, but essentially this doesn’t add all that much to the Bill of Materials, and so we think it will spread to other models, and with that much retail space behind it, it will have the power that Blu-ray commanded in the global retail consumer electronics footprint. And that has enormous influence with consumers.
In September both Samsung and LG were widely expected to deliver some form of Google TV, but still haven’t done so.
And given the fact that the TV itself is facilitating the access to internet content, as long as there is a direct Ethernet or WiFi connection to broadband from the TV, then the TV can be connected to any other type of TV, be it cable, DTH or IPTV or simply ASTC public broadcasts. So this is as much a route to any kind of hybrid as it is purely to the free to air community.
The other key thing about Google TV is the scope of its ambition. Most criticisms published in the few weeks since it has been on sale are about the quality of some video and hitches in its UI, or people just plain don’t want text search and TV on the same screen (they want one dedicated Facebook/Search screen and one dedicated TV screen). Right now Google TV is not supposed to be for everyone, just those who want to shift online viewing into the living room, without being told by Apple or some other CE maker, what exactly they are allowed to watch on the internet. Google TV lets you watch anything you can search, but interestingly that doesn’t include the Apple web site.
The rules for take-off in the consumer space are that first there are people who ‘Want one,’ that the price is set so that they can ‘afford one’ and then finally they ‘know someone who has one.’
Google TV seems to be stumbling upon the first of these three rules because people are certainly paying a great deal more for TV sets than they are for Google TV. So they can afford it. But given the negative newspaper and blog comments about its function, few people are going into a shop and asking for it.
But there is always the fourth rule, ‘I bought something and it had it built in and then I started using it,’ and it is this rule which is responsible for the proliferation of handset cameras and for the success of Blu-ray (built into the PS3), so it might work for Google TV too if enough companies sell it.
But why exactly does any manufacturer want to go ahead and put Google TV into their TV sets? Well that’s simple, it gives access on your TV to Android, which in turn can give you all those Android Market apps on both your TV and on your phone. There is a lot of appeal in that.
Sure it has some mainstream web services lined up such as Netflix, Twitter, CNBC, Pandora, Napster, NBA Game Time, Amazon Video On Demand and Gallery. And putting those apps on a TV isn’t easy without an operating system and a mainstream processor, in this case an Intel Atom. Weirdly the Intel Atom was never developed for Android and Android was never developed on Intel. An ARM based chip would be better we suspect to drive the Android OS and therefore a Google TV device, though it may be outside of the reference platform right now.
Google TV doesn’t actually support Android Market just yet, probably because off this shift to an Intel processor, and that function, like many others, including bug fixes and redesigns, will have to be downloaded to the device over the coming weeks and months. In other words Google TV will get slowly better (or at least different).
The other welter of publicity about the Google TV is from conventional device critics. It’s hard to install, it leads to you having a keyboard in the living room, it produces a screen which combines TV and Internet video in a single interface instead of two interfaces, it costs a lot. The list goes on.
Remember back to the Nexus One phone from Google. It could be bought on the web, but it cost a lot, and only worked with some networks, and had only Google products pre-loaded on the home screen. Sound similar?
We have come to think of Google TV, or rather these three launch devices (Sony TV and blu-ray box and the Logitech set top) as the Nexus One of the Google TV system, and try instead to picture what this system might look like when other contributors have put in some of their own ideas ‘ companies like Samsung and LG and perhaps Motorola, especially when they have leveraged against the idea of both phone (or tablet) and TV using the same instruction set, and working co-operatively (even if it’s on different chips).
Look what HTC did with Android. The only issue is whether or not Google is too arrogant to allow other CE suppliers to mess with its (appalling) UI, and yet still work, something it intrinsically understood was required on handsets, but has not grasped yet here.
The other big criticism is that the major US national broadcast networks have decided that Google is the enemy, and won’t let it’s box play their web content. They are not a significant percentage of web held video, but they do have significantly good content, which people are used to watching.
This decision by broadcaster will, of course, have upset the TV manufacturers like Sony, not that how Sony feels about something is going to bother the US broadcaster very much. It is always upset with broadcasters, because among other things Sony does, its studio makes content for them and they sometimes kill it off, after only a few episodes. So they are used to a love hate relationship.
Right now there is definitely a well-established, existing phenomenon of using two devices when watching TV, and potentially there are three functions. You want the family to continue watching TV, while perhaps those member of the family who are bored with the programming, or who can do two things at once, want to search and Facebook and chat, either about the content or about something else. For that you can use an unconnected and unrelated tablet or smart phone.
The other thing you want to do is look at what’s on some other channels, and once again you might do this either through the set top or from a WiFi connection to a TV portal or some other OTT link.
If the two devices were integrated, then when you decide you have something worthwhile to share with the family, either the results of a video search or something has started on a different channel or something you have been waiting for which has just arrived at your PC in-box, or a comment a friend has made about what you are watching, you should be able to direct it to the TV screen to share with the family.
So you do not really want the TV screen to be the sole repository of all of these functions. For instance you may want to keep a wishlist of content you want to watch, and once again it needs to be on your phone or your media tablet, because other members of the family have their own wishlist and don’t want it confused with yours.
So right now Google needs to open up this platform so that it is attractive not only to TV manufacturers, but to the people designing the UI experience at pay TV operators, and so that handset and tablet makers in particular, can put interactive applications onto Android phones, which allow interaction between the two devices.
In other words what we have seen so far may be the Nexus One equivalent, but there needs to be a platform effort for set tops which is Android based, and gives companies access to what Google has done so far within Google TV, but without forcing them to keep all of it.
One of the problems with Google TV was always going to be that Google video search is pretty awful. And Google TV only has one dimension, text search which makes it frustrating and slow to operate. Why hasn’t it got an intuitive recommendation system such as TiVo, TVinci, TV Genius or Sezmi, which you can toggle on and off and which presents itself as a queue of video stills the way YouTube does. Google could buy one of these for $20 million, off the shelf, along with the development team.
Or it could get better video search from blinkx, which is a wonderful video search engine, which focuses on genuine similarity of content to that which you are watching.
blinkx has just been selected to work on some pay TV service in Europe, and it comes with 16 million hours of indexed internet video, mostly of professional quality. There is no reason why Google, once it admits that its search engine is weak on video shouldn’t go out and buy blinkx. It would cost around £220 million, at its current market capitalization, plus a premium, in dollars that’s perhaps around $400 million.
Another complaint is that Google TV doesn’t support Apple Quicktime video. Now that’s just petty. Apple won’t play nice and support Adobe Flash video, so Google doesn’t want to take anyone to Apple generated content, in Quicktime, which includes anything on the Apple web site. We would have thought Google would be over that kind of tit for tat process which is so Apple.
So if we at Faultline think that Google TV sort of sucks and is the wrong idea in the first place, why place so much faith in Google? Because it’s the right company and we think that it is young enough to learn from its mistakes.
Youngsters will like this interface when watching TV on their own, but youngsters can’t afford this. So improvements have to be made, and prices must come down and that part is not Google’s job. Google needs to busy itself rethinking its strategy to turn Google TV into a platform which allows the creation of multiple hybrid internet/TV user experiences without trying to be rigid about the UI, and see which particular piece of mud sticks. Then it might have another Android class success on its hand, the standard TV operating system.