Google TV

Many controversies and hopes surround the news of Google coming up with Google TV! It’s an attempt to integrate web with TV in a hope to provide viewers with a richer and better experience. Google TV would be having great searching capabilities integrating both TV and online content, so that users can search/watch for their favourite shows any time during the day. Many similar attempts have been made by both Microsoft and Apple to enter into “Connected TV” space, but they haven’t been able to make any big success.

It’s learnt that even Google isn’t trying anything drastically different from Apple/Microsoft other than implementing it on ‘Android Platform’ and encouraging 3rd party applications. It’s scheduled for release in US by end of 2010, and Google is also planning for aggressive international expansion by 2011.

All of this to revolutionize one of the most popular entertainment gadget of all times- Television. Its amazing that TV has remained the top entertaining media since ages, only the method of delivering content has changed. That’s the reason why viewers don’t like any paradigm changes with this traditional source of entertainment.

For Indian users who hope to see Google TV in their homes in time to come there might be some bad news. First of all the technical requirements are high even for users residing in US, forget about that in India-

1.If you don’t buy a Sony HDTV, you need to buy additional external hardware.
2.It will eventually integrate with Sony Playstation, again asking too much from an Indian user.
3.For good performance minimum bandwidth requirement is a 3MBPs connection.
4.Not many users are aware of Android platform or apps in India.

I guess from an Indian perspective we still have a lot to catch up before we can even think of having Google TV in India. We need to have better DTH/Video-on-demand services and good TV guides/mobile applications to make user aware of the importance of having such services in India.