Recently Google announced the concept of Google TV. It’s a pretty interesting idea and will take us into the next evolution of the Internet and television. By expanding the Internet on to TVs it will drastically expand the capabilities of the television and the amount of information that the everyday user can get.
For you sports junkies, imagine being able to watch that football game and by simply hovering over a player being able to see their bio, season, and game statistics. On top of that being able to monitor your fantasy league while watching the game and seeing the catch in addition to the points that were added to you stats.
What about for advertisers? How about clicking on any banner ad at a sporting event to take you to the company’s website? Or maybe clicking on that dress that the actress is wearing at the awards show to find out who made it and where you can order one for yourself? Instead of having to limit your content to 30 second ad spots, interested users could simply elect to watch the additional 2 minutes from YouTube right at the end of ad.
Will there even be a need to have the Weather Channel as an option on your TV or will you simply be able to see the current weather and forecast on the side bar of your TV? News?? Seems pretty obvious that it could be available with a simple click.
It also leads into another question: will your cable companies merely become ISPs at that point? I truly believe that the answer is yes. Once this transition has occurred why wouldn’t I be able to pay A&E directly to watch their shows? This would allow for you to only pay for the programming that you actually want to watch. Also, it would allow you to watch hundreds of programming options that no current cable company carries. On the other hand, how hard would it then be for anyone to produce content that anyone could watch? Pretty simple actually. Could drastically change the landscape in the TV and movie industries when distribution is no longer a barrier to entry.
Add Google TV to all of the current options that are out there today such as the NetFlix integrated boxes and the upcoming Boxee box and I think that we are in the middle of a revolution in the way that we watch and interact with TV.
Are you ready for TV integrated with the Web?
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