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(English) Google getting it right at last with Android TV

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It may still be too early to be sure, but there are signs that with Android TV Google’s connected video strategy is at last starting to look joined up. There is not yet any killer blow in sight, which could only really come from the content angle, but evidence is mounting that Google now has a clearer and more focused strategy that is winning over TV and device makers as well as app developers. The key lies partly in a much mature Android based ecosystem better geared towards TV than was the case when the abortive first attempt called Google TV was launched with much fanfare in 2010.

Then Android was little more than a mobile OS optimized for smartphones and subsequently tablets, with TV supported as a cumbersome add-on that was hard to develop apps for. But the latest version 5.0 codenamed Android Lollipop, first unveiled during the Google I/O developer conference in June 2014, has been revamped for TV with a completely redesigned user interface. This is a significant enhancement based on Google’s own language called Material Design incorporating tools for easy layout of screens with responsive animations, transitions, padding, and depth effects such as lighting and shadow. It comes with new guidelines for developers that make it easier to create a consistent look and feel across the whole Android device constellation, including big smart TVs down through tablets and smartphones to diminutive smartwatch screens. To encourage app creation further, Google sent out developer units, dubbed “ADT-1”, to those that signed up for a test unit at Google I/O 2014.

These nuances were initially missed by many commentators, myself included, at the time of that conference, perhaps partly because the new Lollipop version was still shrouded in a little mystery. My initial reaction to Android TV was therefore quite negative, suggesting it sent confused messages given that Google was also promoting Chromecast and that it offered little more than already existing competitive offerings such as Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire TV.

The reason for being more sanguine about Android TV now is not so much that Google has raised its game. If anything it is the opposite in that the horizons have been narrowed to the confines of an operating platform for TV but crucially now aligned with Chromecast as well as with its developer community. What Google has succeeded in doing is strike a balance between encouraging innovation and yet exercising some control over the environment with an emphasis on a consistent UI across all devices, which is something its competitors have not quite matched yet. We have already seen the fruits of this approach through a few OEMs such as Razer, which has announced Forge TV, a set top for Android TV that throws in some of its gaming streaming.

Casting is now at the center of Android TV and pivotal to delivery of content, with the various new boxes, including Google’s own Nexus, Player, being the first dedicated hardware units to support it. This does though pinpoint the challenge of persuading consumers to pay the extra for the full Android TV experience when they can get Netflix and all the basic content they want from Chromecast. Effectively then Chromecast is the entry level version of Android TV with the full monte running on set tops as well as smart TVs, including models announced by Sony, Philips and Sharp at CES 2015.

The killer feature though would be premium live content and all that can be said at this stage is that Google has prepared the ground with its dummy app called ‘Live Channels for Android TV’.  It remains to be seen what will be on it and how far this goes beyond the content currently available either via Chromecast or YouTube. But at least Google is much better placed to strike a major blow in the intensifying connected TV wars.

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(English) Disruptors are everywhere – do you see them?

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Senior consultant Hugh Massam escaped from the energy sector after serving a 15-year sentence. Here he offers some thoughts post-IBC.

‘There is nought so powerful as a good idea whose time has come’. The question is, do you see the great ideas and disruptors that your competitors see?

When we’re busy developing products, jumping into new markets and maybe sitting in meetings about dense tech or legal issues, it can be all too easy to miss a competitor that’s about to eat your lunch. It was clear to me from three days at IBC that some spaces – such as middleware – are ponds filled with hungry competitors. The ones that spot a seismic shift first – or even make it happen – will be the survivors.

Netflix has been creating such a shift giving sleepless nights to many TV executives. Reliable live streaming over the Internet will probably be even more of a disruptor, and the content delivery suppliers at IBC are promising it for very soon, certainly less than five years, maybe as little as two.

At Wolfpack we are often asked to benchmark clients’ brands, and even this simple exercise can provide startling insights and opportunities pointing out gaps in the market or areas where completion is already fierce. From there we partner with them as marketeers and industry insiders, to help position products and promote them, avoiding the many sand-traps that can befall al product along the way. But what we also do is maintain an outside perspective and look for the real seismic shifts or threats.

Asleep at the wheel? …a story from the energy sector

Looking wider than IBC, the supply of electricity is a former state function and in terms of NPD, was asleep for decades. In some markets both are still true. Even applying basic marketing to it is fairly new and the marketing sophistication of some former state-owned behemoths in this space is still decades behind a sector like broadcast. And let’s face it, not many marketers are hogtied by the need to keep supplying product to a customers with an astronomical cost-to-serve (a wire to a farmhouse in the Outer Hebrides, for example) or to people who patently can’t pay (in practice most energy companies rarely cut people off).  Both happen with electricity.

But in the wider energy sector there is innovation, and it bleeds right into people’s home networks. Besides the obvious shift to local and renewable generation, there’s seismic action in storing power, and in supplying it to your laptop. For example, innovators like Moixa.

A conversation in the energy-supply space is likely to take a bunch of things for granted: Houses need to run off the mains; home electricity networks use standard 110 or 220 volt sockets; solar panels are great but they are best used through an inverter (solar panels generate DC, an inverter converts this to AC) and supplying AC in real-time to the building they are on or to the grid; once the sun goes down solar power is not relevant to evenings - the peak time of use – because batteries are too expensive. These are all fundamental assumptions about the market which players like Moixa are challenging.

Small solar phone chargers are old news. So why can’t a home’s solar panels - already generating DC - directly power small DC devices like phones, laptops and lights through a local network? Why can’t you charge a battery from your solar panels in the day, or from the grid at 1am, and store that power to peak-shave by taking demand off the grid in the evening? The grid provider will pay you handsomely to reduce peak-load on demand – ‘demand management’ is a $1.8B market in the UK alone.

The Economist last year spotted that emerging standards which will soon boost a USB cable’s power-carrying capabilities up to 100V (from the current 10) will change the game too.

Players like Moixa saw the obvious – an explosion in low-power DC devices in the home, and a rise in the number of solar panels producing DC on roofs. They are working hard on dull details like DC voltages and plugs, which have never been standardised.

And at the big end – many people still assume electricity plants are large, should be available 24/7/365,  and need to be built permanently near their fuel supply, but players like Karadeniz Energy and Agrekko are making massive inroads (and profits) supplying floating power plants and rented power generators. And the largest market for the latter may surprise you – the Middle East, not Africa.

So even in a slow-moving market like electricity generation, disruptors are there. The real question is – how often are you checking on the top three potential disruptors in your market?

 

Hugh Massam is a Senior Consultant with Wolfpack and also the Principal Consultant at E Equals Limited, an energy communications agency based in Cambridge, UK. @eequalsuk. 

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(English) Google still playing catch up with Android TV

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In this first blog of our Android TV series, Philip Hunter looks at some of the reasons why Google doesn't seem to have been third-time lucky with its new Foray into the sitting room.

Android TV, Google’s heavily leaked third effort to crack the living room, arrived as expected at its annual Developer conference at the end of June 2014, but once again failed to ignite the field. Google is still playing catchup in its attempts to conquer TV, with the only consolation being that its rivals such as Apple and Microsoft are also floundering in their attempts to stamp their authority on the big screen. Apple TV after all is seven years old now and can still at best be counted as only a moderate success, having failed to establish any sort of market dominance even close to that achieved by iOS for both tablets and smartphones. One reason is that Apple’s iron grip on its ecosystem has proved a handicap in keeping the device isolated and discouraging developers.

Google was determined with Android TV to avoid that fate and continue with its open approach to maximize third party app development with a variety of incentives. But this immediately begs the question for developers of whether Android TV is worth the trouble, unlike the versions for smartphones and tablets where it was always clear there would be a big market. In the case of TV it is still not obvious at all that Android will succeed, given that the market for streaming platforms is already very crowded, with Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Xbox One as well as Apple TV among leading established contenders. There is also Google’s own Chromecast HDMI dongle, representing its second attempt at TV after the abject failure of Google TV. Chromecast has been a reasonable success because of its low price tag of $35 and flexibility, encouraging users to try it alongside their existing pay TV package if they have one, rather than as their primary source of content. But it means Google is now sending mixed and confused messages to both consumers and developers. With Chromecast, Google had given the impression that developers could stop building apps and instead create webpages optimized for the TV screen that would receive commands from an Android smartphone. If Chromecast stays around as it looks like it will, developers now face having to build and support two interfaces to cover the Google TV universe, one for Chromecast and one for Android TV.

The underlying problem though may be with Google’s new strategy of shoehorning Android for TV rather than creating a new operating system. Google is obviously trying to make Android into a ubiquitous operating system with variants for all device platforms, as was evident at its recent so called I/O developers’ conference. There Google unveiled Android Wear for wearables like wristwatch computers, Android Auto for car dashboards and Android One for a new brand of affordable smartphones prices at under $150, as well as Android TV. There is every reason to expect that Android Wear and Android One will be great successes as they are still very much in the heartland of mobile handsets, but with Auto and to an even greater extent TV Google is stretching the envelope of the operating system a long way. History tells us that attempts to create an operating system of everything are doomed to failure, as Microsoft seems to be finding with Windows Phone. Apple had the sense to create a radically new operating system for mobile devices in iOS rather than attempting to adapt the MacOS from its desk top perch. It reaped the rewards with the iPhone and then the iPad.

This leads to the other problem, which is that with Android TV Google is still cast in the role of follower rather than leader, which is not how it grew up to become the world’s most valuable brand. In search Google originally rose to dominance over rivals like Yahoo, AltaVista and Microsoft because it had superior technology and was quickly able to assume a leadership position that came to be reinforced by its human and financial resources. Of course it has been able to reallocate those resources to TV, but without so far being able to conjure up any killer technology.

Android TV actually seems rather similar to Apple TV for the GUI and is modelled on Amazon’s Fire TV in its support for voice input for searching video content. Indeed Google has instructed its developers to avoid need for any text input at all if possible and to rely largely on voice. Google has also stripped out well known features of Android on smartphones, such as support for VoIP, cameras, touchscreens and NFC (Near Field Communication), which are all deemed superfluous for a streaming set top box like device. This is well and good, since it avoids an Android TV box being an over bloated version of a smartphone or tablet. But this may also expose the limitations of the platform, especially as Google is indicating that the operating system will really come of age with its next generation called Android L, which was also previewed at that I/O conference and scheduled for launch towards the end of the year. Android L is a radical rewrite, with improved animation and audio, as well as 3D and contextual awareness, which will all feed into the TV version. Developers may therefore decide to wait until this next generation has arrived before committing to Android TV. Android L will also include many features specific to mobile handsets, including a new battery saving mode, which are mostly irrelevant for the TV version. In this sense Android L will compound rather than solve the problem of becoming too bloated. It may be just a matter of time before the TV version of Android becomes divorced altogether from the mainstream of the operating system, but meanwhile it will most likely fail again to put Google on the podium for OTT TV.

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Google « don’t be evil » and Android-TV will be the biggest news of 2011

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Jamie Beach of IPTV News got me talking about Google and the TV back in February 2009. It always made sense that Google would somehow crack the TV Market but I said from the outset in May 2010, that Google TV wasn't the right way to start.

I recently blogged that Intel's withdrawal from the connected-TV space was good news for STB makers - I could have updated the post when Adobe subsequently announced that they would withdraw from TV altogether, but instead, this update comes to contradict my prediction that "Long live the STB".

The Connected TV jungle out there could for example lead to the absurdity of some content being available on Samsung TVs but not on LG, or the other way round. I admire the way some of these set-makers have boldly gone where no man has been before and built up complete ecosystems. Had I been in their shoes, I wouldn't have been able to do any better, Samsung's efforts are particularly impressive.

Q: So why the all the fuss now then?

A: That jungle might now get urbanized.

By announcing that Android Market Place was also a TV App Market Place during the OTT TV World Summit in London last week (see twitter feed here), Google has finally acknowledged that even they can't manage the complexity of merging the Web and the TV single-handedly. I would put all my bets on Android as an underlying OS technology being a long term success in the TV space. But Google TV as a UI and consumer application may not have such a bright future. It took several years to start getting Android right on Smartphones. Good user experience is harder to get right on a TV screen than on a mobile device. Also Google will not be following in Apple's footsteps with something to benchmark against. If Google can keep Android open and Larry Page keeps his "don't be evil" mantra going, this end of 2011 will be the pivotal moment when everything coalesces in our industry for the TV revolution to get into to full speed with breakthrough is in new services, new business models and new usage.

STB makers might still fit into this future vision even if the Connected TV finally takes off under Android. A smaller piece of a larger cake ain't that bad after all.

So in the end it's all about standardization. In this case it's one imposed by one player rather than a standards body. If this scenario plays out and Android becomes central to the future of TV, it will be interesting to see how other big guns react.

The set makers will have to join the bandwagon and give up their hopes of getting a slice of the service pie. Perhaps the more advanced like Samsung will salvage something from all those marketing dollars spent, at east for their image. But I still have some questions: what is the XBox going to become in this context? And how will Apple react?

Microsoft, the Evil empire of the 90s, doesn't have anything to lose in the TV space. From Redmond, Media Room, the companies flagship IPTV platform can't be much more significant than Apple TV is in Cupertino, some call these initiatives "hobbies". Apple has a strong influence on much of the OTT market through its HLS protocol widely used for Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) streaming. With a "don't be Evil" mantra Apple would continue the move underway from HLS to the MPEG standardized enhancement called DASH. Somehow I doubt they will go through with the transformation, even if they were one of its instigators, but I'd be happy for the industry's sake, to be proven wrong.

PS: Keep an eye on the IPTV News site for some in depth analysis of Google / Android / TV coming soon, I'll be collaborating with Jamie there.

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(English) Take one from the IBC 2010 conference

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Despite numerous visits to the exhibition, this was my first time at IBC's conference - overall the quality both in terms of logistics and level of speakers was topnotch. I only caught one sales-pitch, much better than most trade shows. If you are going to choose one source, IBC is a good candidate. The only problem is that there is just too much going one to be able to focus as my notes below show. Also once the trade-show opens there's too much pull there to stay at the conference. Going the day before seems the only way for me.

Snippets from the social media session

I caught the wrap-up of the BBC speaker: we are looking to help people find other people already talking about their programs. I expect a TV station to cater to a community created around their content, but was surprised to see one so actively looking to actually create one. The beeb’s innovative attitude is impressive. I’m curious to see if they can be successful sustaining this new mindset.

Android based tablet should bring the true democratisation of tablets device for this year’s Christmas season.

The MTV guy said that talking about social media now is 6 yrs too late; I wonder what he was talking about 6 years ago.

Scheduling is recommendation by a brand you trust that is telling you “we think you’ll like to watch this content at this time”.

On BBC iPlayer navigation is still basically by channel. So maybe TV stations won’t die after all.

The Music industry is several years ahead of TV. What Spotify does with Facebook is showing the way. Facebook isn’t as much social recommendation as social validation.

Recommendation is content coming to you, whereas search is you going out to content.

Scheduled content is often the beginning of a recommendation chain. If scheduling looses its importance, how will broadcasters promote shows that are not scheduled?

Is there really wisdom in the crowd: probably not always.

It now seems clear that Social-TV will be multi-screen so connected devices are key. Who will own this value chain, Samsung or Sony Bravia have a head start in terms of brand positioning.

Social TV ain’t easy: Scandinavian broadcaster had to close down Facebook trials around football matches as tempers rose out of control.

BBC: setting up any kind of forum requires a lot of effort to manage. One can’t simply put up a system. Moderation costs will soar.

At this stage an idea came to me that shut out the talking as I wrote it dow:

Back to the future: After the Internet enabled the long tail, is recommendation, be it social or otherwise, converging back towards front catalogue. Technology under the hood might whiz obscure back-catalogue or UGC items to the forefront in a flash. But as consumers, will we live in a world that will shrink back to hundreds of choices, not the millions the Internet once promised? Ouch, it would be like going back to the middle-ages!

Back to the session:

I heard talk of many devices at the IBC 2010 conference the three that show what a wide variety are on decision makers’ minds were: iPad, the iPad and oh yes, I almost forgot: an iPad.

Cisco #fail

Alex Balfour, is the new media guy from the excitingly named LOCOG A.K.A the 2012 Olympics organisation committee. In 20 dull minutes he mentioned the name Cisco four times and their product name 3 times, the session should actually have been called Cisco & Social media. A Cisco rep took over and when this became a clear sales pitch. I left. Come on Cisco & IBC, don’t let this sort of thing happen, your better than that. Some of the most interesting speakers in the industry work for Cisco, Yes you can!

I caught the last part of a Panel on “the way forward with online video”.

US TV networks are finding that when they promote alternative distribution channels as well as main broadcast feed, there is no cannibalisation. However movies are not available outside of the main feed and TV content is only available during small windows, so as to maximise syndication etc.

Connected TV

The last session I caught on my IBC conference day was on the Connected TV chaired by David Docherty

I was disappointed at how UK centric things were in the intro to this session. The “D-Book” that was described as some sort of holly grail is actually technical specs for UK’s DTT, what’s the big deal?

Ian Fromely from NBC Universal is an entertaining speaker, he had me smile a few times, but he didn’t seem at liberty to say much of significance, or if he did, I didn’t understand.

LoveFilm

The LoveFilm lady gave the same presentation as six months ago in London. The company is basically a UK based baby-Netflix (that Amazon now wants to buy – LoveFilm that is, not Netflix Doh!). LoveFilm is 6 years old, with 1,6M customers in 5 countries but mainly UK (1,2M). The main challenge is educating customer base for the move from mail order to digital. The digital service was launched in UK may 2009. Lack of figures on digital usage leads me to assume the take-up is disappointing. But the way Netflix is transforming its 1950’s style mail order business into an online on-demand business shows that it’s easier for these companies to make the transition than it was for Blockbuster. Consuming from home seems to be more important than having a huge choice …

Google – I’m still not convinced

The GoogleTV presenter was not giving anything away. She might as well have cancelled. Oh no she gave a scoop: GTV will be launched in US before EOY 2010! Oops we know that too.

Her presentation showed just how immature Google still is in its approach to TV: he key focuss was on 5 hrs a day average viewing (hmm I though Google was global not just a US company) – 70bn$/yr ad revenues– 4 billion TV users.

She did say something that caught my attention: “TV is reliable” to which I’d add just like fixed-line phones before VoIP. If that is really a USP of the TV then a company whose products are all branded ‘beta’ for several years after launch should stay away.

The Google spokesperson went on to say that the web needs to be a natural extension of the TV. So hooking with previous remark I take it Google is going to tame the web into being well behaved and reliable.

In response to an audience question she said “Google TV will be a free open source platform” finishing off with “If anyone can scale to support explosive demands on the Web from connected TVs, Google can”. Next time she should just take questions, cause that’s the only time she said anything of interest.

My song for Samsung

Despite prohibitive roaming charges the only talk that got me to tweet during the conference was Samsung’s. I tweeted “By saying their connected TV’s aren’t about disintermediation, but about bringing value, Samsung is coming an intermediary.”

Their site www.samsungsmarttvchallenge.eu shows they mean business and sales figures got me listening: 1 set in 4 sold in Europe is a Samsung.

On the down side Samsung’s connected TV is proprietary environment, but at least it’s built on open standards.

I’m still not actually sure what got me to sit up and listen to Dan Saunders. Maybe it’s that Google and Sony are pushing in so many directions at once in the connected TV space that I’m confused and think even their staunchest supporters will be too. Apple on the other hand is very focussed, but runs closed TV shop for now.

Samsung has the mix that feels right: aggressively pushing a single way to get TV’s connected with just enough control to keep things working, and enough openness to recreate the Appstore phenomenon that put the iPhone into orbit around the sun.

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(English) Google TV off to a bad start

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Google is undisputedly good at advertising and search. I’ve been convinced for a while now that Google & TV make sense, see this IPTV News interview from 18 months ago.

If Google had decided to enable a business model for companies from say Roku to NDS using its advertising capability linked to search, I’d be totally confident in the venture even though success might have still taken time to reach.

But by embracing the whole middleware environment with a complete solution, Google has bitten off too much to chew even for them. Large companies from Intel to Microsoft (including Apple) have all failed their initial entry into the TV market. Different reasons apply in each case; one commonality is the size and lack of agility of these companies that always want to fix the whole problem instead of concentrating on their strengths. In spite of still branding its products as betas, Google has now become such a behemoth that its legendary light-footedness has all but gone.

As Mike Elgan points out in his entertaining computerworld blog, the TV experience is mostly stuff you don’t want. The lean-forward Web experience is one of finding a needle you do want, in a haystack that you don’t. TV’s problem is more about sweeping out all the rubbish. This is where the traditional pay TV business fits in, although it is not clear whether this is cause or consequence.

Google may have some flashy (or should that read HTML5?) animations explaining what Google TV is. However, just reiterating that they’ll deliver the best of the Web and the TV together is not reason enough for this to happen.

So ...  what actually needs fixing for the Web and TV to Merge?

  • 1. reliability or stability of the set-top-boxes (or stuff inside the connected TV)
  • 2. ease of use of the user interface
  • 3. navigation within all the newly available content

Starting with the last item on this list, Google’s premise seems to be that they will be in a better position to resolve the difficult issue of content navigation. They do indeed have a unique selling point here with their search technology. But the other blocking point needs to be fixed first. I have 6 separate devices in my living room, all with the latest firmware; I can crash any of them, with sometimes just a few button presses. Android, the operating system that will power Google TV, is still pretty shaky, and that is a no go in my book. The lack of robustness of the demos at Google’s I/O event that amused many of the bloggers present, is telling in this respect.

Working up the list, despite its relative failure to date, Apple TV introduced the poster Art concept that all modern TV UI now mimic with variable success. Nobody has yet provided an adequate solution to navigating Web amounts of content from a lean-back TV viewing posture. Should Steve Jobs up the Apple TV status from its official “hobby project” to something more strategic, then whomever can fix this usability issue, second in my list, Apple can.

As for the first blocking point, Google delivered Android for the Smartphone at breakneck speed. But in so doing, confused the market with a multiplicity of unstable versions. This is almost the opposite of MacOS on the iPhone.  Apple’s closed approach furthermore ensures both a seamless user experience and a certain level of quality. Google’s open approach can open up a Pandora’s box of faulty or incompatible apps. For robustness in the TV space one would more naturally look to the NDS’s or the OpenTV’s of the world to fix this issue.

If I were Eric Schmidt, I’d put Android for TV back into the R&D labs for another couple of years. Then choose a partner, or to be more true to their philosophy, publish open API’s for anyone to monetise OTT content through an ad system designed for hybrid TV. Going for gold during a rush, the way Google is now doing is risky business and they may well fail. If they just sold the shovels, Google would be sure to succeed and they could always buy back into the whole TV experience when the dust settles.

Combining the Web with TV, which is the Google TV bottom line, has been tried more times than any industry expert can count.

If it finally succeeds because big HD screens let you read text in the living room and devices let you interact with cloud based services, maybe with voice control or gesture based interfaces, then surely it’s the set makers that stand to win. I don’t see how current the Google-Sony-Logitec alliance could withstand the strains of success.

If the glue that finally sticks the Web and TV together turns out to be a reshaped entertainment and media ecosystems, with OTT becoming the norm and content flowing directly to TV’s through bit-pipes, then we would see a fragmentation of the content industry. Google could then dominate this space just like it does the Internet - thanks to its search/advertising model. However, the advent of file sharing and the MP3 saga have woken the sleepy content industry.  I don’t believe they will let Google reach such prominence here. Even if I’m wrong and they do, what revenues does Google derive from MP3 file sharing, legal or otherwise?

Quality live TV & film are still associated with subscription services. During the advent of the Internet over the last decade, the Pay TV industry has only gotten stronger with rising numbers of subscribers. TiVO tried to innovate a new model but has seen its active subscriber base drop from 3.3m to 2.5m in the last 18 months.

An executive from the TV industry once told me that young enthusiastic techies like myself had been explaining to him how new technology would radically change the TV business for over ten years. This conversation took place over five years ago! His point was, and I suppose still is, that for fifteen years, waves of technical change have only reinforced the basic pay TV model. The still topical world recession hasn’t dented their subscriber numbers.

Let me revisit the content navigation issue once more. Beyond the sheer mass of available content where Google’s search will solve problems, the problem is also going to be about home networks. There’s no point having a great search engine if it cannot index the content on all the different devices in the home. Google is no better equipped than others to achieve seamless home networking. In fact, some like the proponents of the DLNA standard are probably better equipped for this.

I’ll end with lack of clarity from Google TV’s positioning.

Google champions the search paradigm where revenue is generated from advertising. With it’s Android operating system, Google is moving also into the iTunes/Appstore model where revenue is generated from the sale of apps. It’s not clear to me how Google will be able to play both hands simultaneously on the TV.

A blog entry by Vintner: If Google TV were a bicycle, I'm a fish also points to the lack of clarity. This fun read states that Google is no longer a start-up and that pushing technology is no longer enough, even if it’s cool technology.

Indeed, there’s already too much technology in the crowded TV space. What the industry desperately needs are viable business models to enable OTT content flows to complement - rather than replace  - existing pay TV platforms. So Google, please put your TV technology back in the R&D lab where it belongs and bring us the tools to find & monetise video from the web on the TV.