Google TV – Demystified

Authored By: Harish R:

Image Source :Google Images

Every firm is started with a specific target market and it caters to the needs of that segment. Once that is satisfied and the firm is established as a market leader or a monopoly, they move on to cover other market segements or entirely different markets even. One such example is Google TV. Read on to find out more.

Google as we all know started as a simple search engine project of two graduate students in Stanford and later got developed into the most dominant IT firm ever that reached a place like no other company by becoming a verb in the Oxford dictionary. Now that they have conquered the search engine market, they decided to add other products to their catalogue. Some of these products were created by themselves while others were taken over from smaller firms. Most of these were largely successful like Gmail, Picasa, Labs, Codeplex etc while it has its own share of bad products like Google Wave, Orkut etc. All these products are purely aimed at covering the user’s complete web requirements.

Similar to Google, Apple also started with one product and later branched out into several other products. It started with Mac and now it offers several devices like Ipod, Iphone etc. Apple has earned its own medal like Google by being a style and sophistication statement. As expected, both these companies started to engage in a profolio war. It started off with the browser war – Chrome vs Safari. Then to the OS war – MacOS vs ChormeOS. The most famous mobile world wars iOS vs Android and iPhone vs Nexus One. In all these battles on new frontiers for both companies, several other players were existing. They were getting challenged as well as these two managed to raise the benchmark by several notches at a very rapid pace that few of the native players got totally lost while others still continue fighting.

Since both these companies are engaging in several battles simultaneously at a very rapid pace, they have to use agile tactics, copy each others strengths (and file patent infringements against each other), use their unique marketing tactics and try making them better for their use and similar interface which in other words translate into the same software. Of course, several reasons can be given for such methods used but it is my humble observation that though the standards have been raised in all of these arenas, innovation which both of these companies are known for very long is almost missing nowadays. Take for example a new battle ground of television. Apple TV vs Google TV.

Apple TV has been in existence from the end of 2007 and Google TV and its features has just been announced. No information on pricing or when it will be available to the public is announced. Like I said, innovation is nearly missing in this product. It integrates your TV and a computer into a seamless entertainment experience as they call it and creates some sort of a hybrid product that helps you browse the internet on your TV, get TV shows easily and access the specially made YouTube application. Google TV can be bought preinstalled in a Sony HDTV, bluray player or bought as a seperate set-top box. Bluray playing, HD videos, Twitter and Facebook are available by default. Google uses its own marketing strategy for it by giving away 10,000 free Google TV devices, made product purchase possible from several sources by deafult like Amazon, Shoutcast, Rhapshody and YouTube’s new yet to be launched service of Pay-per-view. Apart from these, Google TV appears to be a better hardware compared to Apple TV by including HDMi from cable/satellite box, stronger GPU, dedicated DSP, keyboard and pointing device. It runs on the latest Android OS and so all Android apps run on it (yes, iTunes and iApps rival here). It can be controlled from an Android smart phone and a web page can be pushed from the phone to TV for better viewing. They have roped in some good partners for harware like Sony and Logitech too.

Overall, I think Google TV is a very good product that I would love to own compared to Apple TV or other similar products like Boxee for now. I am sure in the next release of Apple TV or Boxee or some other similar product, the hardware advantage of Google TV will be nullified and the software part of it will be dealt in their own unique ways. Like I said, unless some terrific innovation which both these companies are known for is made in this sector, these products will only remain to be a rat race with each release better than the other with little or no difference and the customer will never feel complete or will be able to make a good choice based on the idiosynchasies of the products.