Free TV In High Definition With A Google Box

Free TV In High Definition With A Google Box

Google has recently announced a brand new offering from the "stable of search": an ambitious new TV service that aims to unify the live television and web experiences. The service will allow viewers to perform searches on live TV channels in addition to seeking out free tv content from web sites such as YouTube or Google Video. So what is required to achieve this new functionality? Either a special TV, or a normal TV connected to a Google box.

The TVs are expected to hit the market in the fall of 2010, rolling off the production line at Sony, who will also build the service into a Blu-Ray DVD player. Set top boxes and peripherals will be built by Logitech, although the service will also be controllable from a mobile phone running Google's Android operating system.

The TVs and boxes will also use Android and will rely on an Intel microprocessor. Google's Rishi Chandra believes that "video should be consumed on the biggest, brightest, best screen in your house - the television". Of course, the bottom line is dollars. Approximately $70bn is spent annually on TV adverts in the US alone, and with 4bn TV users worldwide, Google wants in on the act.

Primarily drawing its revenue from web-based advertising, TV seems a natural space for Google to seek to occupy. Let's take an example of how this will work.

The service is built around an onscreen search box, similar to Google's web offering, that allows people to search for both subscription-based or free tv content on live channels or the web. Running a Google search for "watch free tv" will bring up results from a collation of live channels, blogging sites in addition to streaming web services such as Hulu, Crackle and Amazon. TV shows will be streamed from the web using Google's Chrome browser.

This raises the point as to whether streams are published with the consent of their respective copyright owners. However, despite Google's somewhat questionable policy of shutting down Adsense publisher accounts of those who publish adverts on sites that link to copyrighted content, the search giant itself is not averse to organising both legal and illegal content in the same set of results.

Therefore it remains to be seen if copyright owners will target Google to remove sites from its results that link to their content, or whether they will target the sites themselves with takedown notices. On the other hand, they may opt to work with web sites to integrate selected portions of their content to have it distributed via this new service offering.

The browser also allows people to search for non-video content from the web. Therefore, Google is not simply targeting TV services with this new addition. It hopes, ultimately, to make the TV into a games console, photo viewer, music player, or basically anything that the computer is now. According to Mr. Chandra, Google will strive to have the same impact on TV that the smartphone had on the mobile experience. Are we approaching the end of commercial breaks as we know them? The end of a commercial break is always welcome!

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