Google to Invade Another Medium: Your TV

Google Announces Plans to Roll Out Google TV This Year

In a sea of major announcements from Google’s I/O Conference, one of the most talked about tidbits was Google TV, which the company officially announced today.

“With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favourite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web,” Google wrote on its blog.

Users can take advantage of Google TV from a new Sony television with the software built in, or via a set-top-box that can be purchased separately. Google has already partnered up with Sony and Logitech to install Google TV into other devices, such as Blu-ray players and set-top-boxes.

Google believes that finding your favourite program will be made easier with Google TV because you will be able to search for whatever you like, just as you would on Google.com. The search function can also be used to find other online content including news websites, videos, music, and even games.

The Google TV platform is also an open one, meaning that developers of apps for the Android marketplace will be able to build their own apps for TV. Developers can begin today to start developing these apps via Google’s software development kit which is now available.

Social media blog, Mashable, has just released more details into the launch of the new service. According to the report:


The dive into TV is a brave move by Google in a time when many people have grown accustomed to similar enhanced TV services like TiVo, Apple TV, and Netflix. It is also a smart move by Google due to the fact that people are spending more time online than in front of the television.

The official blog post did not mention the ad platform model explicitly, but Google usually uses advertisements to sell its free services. By marrying TV and the web, Google will try to take control of your living room and transform your TV into the one-stop shop for all of your entertainment needs.