Tom Foremski: IMHO

Tom Foremski

Google TV - so what? It's all about the content...

By Tom Foremski | May 20, 2010, 6:30pm PDT

Summary: The geek community is super excited about Google TV but it’s not about who has the best box it’s about who controls the best content…

I can’t get excited by Google TV because no matter how fine the box is, no matter how great the wired and wireless connectivity, or the user interface, at the end of the day it’s all about the content.

Who controls the content? It’s the distributors. It’s the major TV and cable channels.

Take a look at what happened at Hulu, the Comedy Channel pulled its popular The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. There’s still plenty of content on Hulu, but it’s long tail stuff, old reruns of once popular shows, etc.

You can now watch HBO online, but only if you are a cable TV subscriber.

The distributors control what you can and cannot watch online.

This is why Apple has described Apple TV as a “hobby” because its a limited platform, its limited to what you have on your computer or that can be downloaded from iTunes.

Will things change? It would be great if everything were online, everything ever created, every film, every TV show, everything we see on cable TV could be just an IP address away from our couch.

But that would be incredibly disruptive since we would only pay for what we wanted and nothing else. We wouldn’t be subsidizing sports channels, for example, if we never watch sports.

Pick-and-watch would dramatically lower our bills. And that’s why we won’t get to that utopian world because the TV and cable distributors don’t want to be disrupted. And who can blame them? I certainly don’t like the way the media industry is being disrupted but I’m not in a position to do much about it. They are.

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Please see: Sam Diaz - Google I/O: Introducing Android Froyo and Google TV

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TVs, Tv & Home Theater, Cable, Personal Technology, Home Entertainment, Telecommunications, Tom Foremski

Tom Foremski reports on the business and culture of Silicon Valley at the intersection of technology and media.

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RE: Google TV - so what? It's all about the content...

yantangseo 17th Sep

oh, thank you :D!! haha yeah totally chanel bag grin

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Google TV content opportunities

R_macdonald 20th May 2010

I think Google TV will be seen as a monumental inflection point in the realization of "TV convergence." Android developers are going to have a field day employing dynamic querying of TV metadata and calling related internet content to deliver highly personalized & contextualized extended viewer engagement opportunities.

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Just another way for Google to sell ops to advertise to you.

matthew_maurice 20th May 2010

Really, is it that hard to find a TV show? With the program guide on my Digital Cable service I have no problem looking up a show and finding when and on which channel it's playing over the next 3 days. This appears to be just another method for Google to gather information on one's interests so that they can sell a company the opportunity to advertise to you. I don't have any particular problem with that, but let's not kid ourselves that Google is doing anything other than what they really are.

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RE: Google TV - so what? It's all about the content...

maskman01 20th May 2010

@matthew_maurice Try boxee for a bit.

Even in beta you start to appreciate how much more convenient this method is over traditional cable.

So many shows I've been able to watch after they have been broadcast because someone has told me to check them out. With a DVR I would need a Time-Delorian to achieve the same thing.

I hope Google can form the content partnerships that boxee has struggled to get at times.

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RE: Google TV - so what? It's all about the content...

foremski 20th May 2010

I connect a video cable to my TV all the time and I have the equivalent of Google TV today...

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The future is already here

tonymcs@... 20th May 2010

Yes it's illegal, but BitTorrent and its siblings as well as torrent sites already offer every television program and film worldwide.

As soon as a program is broadcast (and sometimes before) an Xvid AVI file is available. The films will be terrible quality until a DVD is released, but the TV shows are all high quality and do not have advertisements.

If you already watch cable and free to air broadcasts then you will see these programs eventually - at the mercy of tv programmers or wait until they're syndicated and showing about 6 times a week.

This brings up one talking point. If you will be licenced to view these programmes in the future are you just effectively timeshifting them by downloading them now?

There might be some draconian future where peer-to-peer is banned (difficult since there are many legitimate uses), but that's unlikely, so are we simply just going to ignore it until it goes away?

TV/Movie producers always bring out worst case scenarios - no one pays so shows don't get made. However, there seems to be no downturn in profits due to piracy. Change is more likely to come from a change in advertising models, the death of dead tree media and free to air broadcasting and the growth of the internet.

So virtually everything is already online and the content producers can't stop it. They should be looking at solutions that allow people to use the content and return some revenue to them. How about internet licences for your favourite TV show? You pay some low amount for a season and you are free from prosecution and able to get the content from anywhere. Or ISPs allowing torrents have to give a certain amount of their torrent revenue (remember all these people are actually paying to download the data) into a global copyright fund.

Whatever we do, it's no good pretending the elephant isn't in the room.

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RE: Google TV - so what? It's all about the content...

kevsan 21st May 2010

Tonymc hit it right on the bail.
Once again we see the media industry scrambling around half blind to today's technology all for...... power.
The media moguls power is distribution. When TV/cable companies sell their products to other networks, especially outside the USA, they bundle the occasional good program with loads of junk. It's their way of recovering losses from junk shows.
They lose distribution they lose that cash cow.
Same applies to music, except they are worse.

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RE: Google TV - so what? It's all about the content...

Joey1058 23rd May 2010

Google's answer to tv content online is called YouTube. Google TV is only a method of content distribution via that black thing hanging on your wall. In five years, Google TV will be dead. Content will be distributed directly via HUDs. 3D is going to be the true innovation, as soon as the techs and programmers stop fighting each other over standards. And for the record, I think 3D is stupid. So I'm being impartial in my comment.