Google TV – A promise of a web based searchable TV experience
Google TV, the new Google, Sony and Intel initiative has a potential to dramatically change the way we view TV today. Google has partnered with Sony and Intel to create a Google TV, made by Sony and powered by Intel chips that would enable a big-screen living-room web experience.
Such a set top box will become a central home portal for managing content and connectivity interactions for the whole household, through personalized handling mechanisms and will enhance new value chains, business models and consumption patterns. It will empower a TV anytime environment and will revolutionize the way TV content is consumed, to resemble web 2.0 seamless culture.
Today there are inherent gaps between passive TV viewership and interactive web navigation. Introducing Google search capabilities will make viewership intuitive when changing from a lean back TV mode into the lean forward web based interactivity.
TV viewership is passive by nature. You watch programs within channels, in a push mode, have no ability to interact with content, family or friends in real time around the viewed content items.
More advanced set top boxes allow for limitedpull capabilities, services and VOD (view on demand) that are based on pull and active selection of what to view and when.
A web based, Google empowered TV will enable dimensions that do not exist today. It will turn the passive TV experience into a connected and shared experience and will bring connectivity to an audience that had no accessibility to the digital empowerment of the web. It will empower interactions with content in various interactive ways, web based services and new food chains around content consumption, targeted ads and up to commercialization of items and social media connectivity through the living room screen, by facilitating communicating with family members and friends in real time around a viewed program.
The digital divide is especially prominent in regard to TV, Internet and IPTV. Older generations, who are more technophobes, tend to choose the passive, coach potato like TV viewership. It’s a medium which is familiar to them, with which they feel safe. At the same time, many boomers are used to the basic Google interfaces, as search is one of the basic functions they know how to make on the web. Google should take an inclusive approach and introduce a simplified intuitive interactive TV interface that will bridge the digital divide and provide a gateway to the connected interactive web world through simplified user friendly usability and interaction patterns.
TV viewers will change from passive spectators to active designers of their available or tailored options. The borderline between traditional television and Internet will become obsolete, to be replaced by full media convergence. The origin of the content – TV or web based, will become immaterial; the only factor will be the relevance to viewers’ affinities and choices.
A new era of TV viewership that will integrate social media with traditional broadcast media, will empower a whole social interaction infrastructure around programs. From the simple connectivity with family and friends, sharing views and feelings around a viewed program and up to creating ad hoc social communities of interest, encompassing the TV equivalent to location awareness – like who is watching this and that program now – from within my social sphere and up to real time communities created around a broadcasted program.
Challenges that lie ahead for achieving a flowing Google TV experience include issues such as:
- Privacy considerations
- Personalization – profiling users and monitoring their viewership to create a predictive user context and recommendation offerings
- Harmonizing offerings around users – from viewership, connectivity and up to commercialization
- DRM (digital rights management) issues – taking care of the rights of all participants in the new food chains created around pull based TV viewership
- Audio-Visual content indexing to enhance searchability
- Harmonized tagging and referencing schemes from various broadcasters
- Simple navigation and selection in the converged multimedia and TV content offerings enabled through a search engine
- Creation of personalized accessibility in a TV Google web based portal that can be intuitively adapted to personal choices, habits and connectivity patterns.
- Harmonization of TV and web based business models and food chains to create new long tail TV based economic opportunities.
- New ad based personalization and targeting models
- Translating elements from the participatory web to be enhanced around TV programs, communities of interest and social web aspects.
Personalizing TV viewership and translating it into a web like searchable experience is a very significant step in adapting the web to larger audiences and turning the living room into a TV web based personal portal.
Google is in a perfect position to lead the home TV revolution. Google has reorganized the distributed content on the web to make it searchable for its users, and capitalize on it as its ad based revenue making platform for the digital world. Google sells its online advertising through a unique online model, where every Google search is analysed to determine which advertisers are best matched to get exposure through the “sponsored links” on every results page.
Imagine Google reorganizing the TV and web based multimedia distributed content to make it searchable, build new on demand, pull based food chains and activate its analysis tools to retarget the repository of TV ads, the engine at the heart of commercial TV economics. Such a disruptive TV ad based system will replace the traditional TV ad spot buying with fully automated digital marketplace systems, by best matching relevance to individual spectators, in a web like manner. The same data mining methods at the heart of content searchability, users’ data collection, ad placement and their respective matching mechanisms can create an increasing return cycle for all the food chains, business models and for all the participants in the new TV based environment, with Google’s engines at its heart.
Let’s only hope that in the process Google will manifest the due respect, transparency and sensitivity to its users’ trust, privacy, choices and affinities.
Disclaimer: I have a traditional commercial TV background. Also, already in 2000 I was involved in the global TV anytime forum and over the years I was involved in additional digital TV initiatives.
