Google TV Will "Change the Way People Live their Lives"

It’s Google TV week, with major announcements coming from early application development and media partners and the unveiling of Google TV hardware from Logitech on Wednesday.

How big a deal is Google TV? Mike Hudack, the respected CEO of free video publishing platform Blip.tv, wrote today that Google TV is the real deal – a technology that will knock down the walls between traditional broadcast studio TV and the long-tail of open video content produced by consumers, producing free choice and competition. It will bring new and previously marginalized voices to the world’s stage. Steve Jobs said in his latest Apple TV unveiling that consumers “don’t want amateur hour” on their TVs. Google vs Apple will once again be the Open Web vs. the Curated Web, this time on TV.

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Open TV as a Game Changer

“Every once in a while a product comes along which promises to change the way people live their lives,” Hudack wrote in a post today. “Google TV is one such product.”

We’ve had a Google TV in our New York office for a few months now. It’s good. Very good. The main reason why it’s so good is that it, once and for all, demolishes the boundary between traditional broadcast and cable television and Internet video. People with a Google TV will no longer differentiate. It will be as easy to watch a blip show as it will be to watch a CBS show. This is fundamentally good for producers and this is fundamentally good for viewers….

We’re very excited. We’re at the beginning of a new age, an age where the monopoly over content distribution is eroding and anyone with talent and drive can access audiences… and audiences can decide what’s best for them (which is not, necessarily, what’s best for the television network).

Bill Gates has a saying: people always overestimate the amount of change in the short term and underestimate the amount of change in the long term. That is as true now, in this situation, as it has ever been. Google TV will take a while to change the way people produce and consume video. But it — and the other products it inspires — will most definitely, over time, change the way we think about television itself. And that will be a fundamentally good thing.

Let’s put it this way. In scenario A, today’s media landscape, millions of TV watchers can see Glee or Dancing With the Stars with no trouble at all. The TV stations run those shows and make millions selling ads around them. In scenario B, a TV landscape powered by the Open Web, millions of TV watchers will be able to see video content made by Iraq war veterans, Mexican immigrants, victims of human trafficking, critics of industrial pollution and countless other examples of content that major TV broadcasting stations would never or far more rarely put in front of millions of people because they couldn’t sell ads around it. The media universe of everyday people could be changed dramatically – and with it, our understanding of the world, each other, politics, business and culture.

Will People Watch Democratic TV?

The Web was supposed to democratize communication and content decades ago. In some ways it has, but the gravitational draw of closed networks and limited, professional content remain strong. Add in the application platform, however, and the problem of discovering the best in the long, long tail of user generated content will be closer to solved.

As author Patty Seybold wrote last month: “Open Source application development platforms, like Google’s Android TV, will also make it easier for developers to provide all kinds of useful applications to both direct our attention to content we would otherwise miss and/or to mash it up and make it more accessible in interesting ways.”

Long-tail content, easy publishing to the TV, applications that provide discovery and recommendation beyond “Googling for TV” – that’s a potent combination.

As reporter Patricio Robles wrote this Spring, “Google TV might be one of the most important things the company has attempted, and that alone makes it worth getting at least a little bit excited about.”

Apple’s curated mobile App Store has proven far more desirable than Google’s bulk-bin of half-baked Android Apps. The polished chrome of the Apple user experience has helped make it nearly the most-valuable corporation in the world, in fact. Of course, Apple TV supports the open publishing platform YouTube, and Google TV will have a heavy emphasis on applications from professional content silos as well. But there is some merit to a comparison of these two as closed vs open, because of the nature of the iTunes vs Android app stores.

What do you think? Can Google TV make Open TV a winner? Or will the curated experience of Apple TV prove more compelling in reality, for most people?

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