It looks like Google is planning to make a bigger push into the television market than it has ever done before. Earlier this month Google announced that the company will be developing a TV operating system (OS) that can be built into TVs, Blu-Ray players, and stand-alone boxes. The OS will be based on Android and will be open sourced in Summer 2011 (Winter 2011 in Australia).

With this announcement Google will be entering an almost unknown territory for them. Despite the Google AdSense on TV, the company has never really made a hard push into the television market. If all goes well for Google, they will be able to take share of a US$70 billion advertising market. Their first attempt at television ads was a bit of a failure – never actually getting to much traction for the most part. The company hopes that Google TV will be a different story.

Google is also trying to do what many others have tried to do in the past, Apple and Microsoft have all but failed completely in this market segment, Google is hoping that they can change the tech industries luck in the very competitive TV advertising business.

Thanks to the parent company’s reputation and connections, Google TV will be partnering with a number of big names – Intel for the processors, Best Buy for the retail, Sony TVs and Blu-Rays, Logitech for set top boxes, and Adobe for Flash support.

Google TV will be available before the holiday season 2010.

The Google TV interface does not offer anything that we haven’t already seen in other set top boxes or even media center PCs. It is very similar to the Xbox Media Center, Apple TV, and even the Roku interface.

Google has repeatedly refused to answer the question of “how much it will cost” but I feel that it should have a very competitive price point. I believe that to be successful this thing needs to be sold under the cost of the Apple TV which is around $330 for the 160GB model.

If the device and the operating system live up to the demonstrations and the information that is available at this stage, and its performance is consistent across all platforms (Sony TVs, set top boxes, Blu-Ray players), I believe that it could become a big hit.

I’m sure Google will be releasing more information about this product through the winter and launch a big add compaign prior to the release, so it will be very interesting to see how this progresses until launch day.

Here is a quick introduction video:

No related posts.