Sony shows Google TV inside, which implies Intel Right?

Amazing showcase of GOOGLE TV was shown on SONY TV.
While Samsung and LG were widely expected to deliver some kind of Google TV devices at IFA, nothing so far has appeared in TV blogs except outrageous claims about how both companies are going to increase/double their TV market share, whereas Sony seems to have openly demonstrated a TV set with the Google platform, which captured the imagination of the attending press.

When Google TV (pictured) was announced in May we gave it short shrift saying that we expected so much, but received so little. The complete lack of content deals made us shrug our shoulders. But after hearing about the Sony device we may be ready to change our view, because there’s another way to think about the Google TV set top, and we are coming to think of it like the Nexus one, the Android phone which Google tried to sell directly to the public, which sank without trace.

It’s not that Google will go up against Apple here, cutting content deals and supplying hardware directly to consumers. No instead we should think of this as another Android, quite simply a platform which promotes other Google services, and which can cheaply be put to work by TV manufacturers or operators. Google’s Eric Schmidt says that he will chase content and we are sure that he will, but we think it won’t be headline pay TV content, it will be a backbone of iTunes-alike content which will make it easier for Google to get buy-in for this as a platform.

So if Google TV, the set top, is Nexus One, its reference design for TV sets is Android. And that means that while almost no-one may go out and buy the Google TV, lots of people may end up with a device which does the same job. If they buy a Sony TV, Google TV could be there come November; and by then Samsung and LG may also have joined the party.

All that Google TV is designed to do is take over from where Yahoo! was with Intel’s support and its widget platform. All that the hardware is designed for is so that anyone outside of pay TV architectures and who doesn’t want an entirely new TV set, can still get the benefits of the Google style features by retrofitting the set top to their existing TV platform.

When Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked recently when he was going to make money out of Android, he replied that the increase in advertising sales as a direct result of Android was more than enough to pay for everything it had cost the company many times over. And it may be just the same with Google TV. The device picks up a small sub-set of have-nots on its own, but the idea and architecture becomes the basis for taking Android Market and TV widgets to old and new TVs, giving them a browsing architecture, and of course the chance to use Google applications such as Maps, and the embedded Chrome browser.

Our concern that Google would never get pay TV content while it is tied up in Court with Viacom, would therefore never adversely affect sales of Google TV. Instead it will rely on creating a platform that allows both free-to-air and pay TV to better compete with one another. So instead of interminable negotiations with content companies, Google will offer all the tools to make TV better for Broadcasters and Pay TV operators who need to solve the hybrid problems of opening up their customers to the Internet.

Of course Google can make it MORE attractive to broadcasters by adding some content and of course apps which will show off a considerable amount of existing internet content, in a ready made format. One of the best things that Google can do for its TV customers is to appeal to publishers and advertisers, and offer an advertising option through Google TV, so that either device manufacturers or broadcasters can make more money from more interactive TV advertising.

Sony's Google TV set was 1080p on a 40-inch screen, running Chrome for browsing the Web, Google Maps and Adobe Flash. The user interface apparently feels like TV, although we haven’t seen it ourselves, and like many IPTV systems the browser can become a transparent overlay on the video and a Quick Search Box offers searches on the Web and on any TV resources, such as the DVR, and integrates the results.

This is tougher than it sounds and we assume that Google servers are doing a lot of the heavy lifting to enable video search.

Sony was showing the TVs at IFA, but it wasn’t billing them as the finished article, it was still talking about them as a work in progress, that would be with us before Christmas. There are no details about the Intel chip inside the new Sony TVs, whether or not it’s the Atom CE4100 or another Atom, but there’s Intel in there somewhere.

Although Google TV is aimed fairly and squarely at Yahoo, at IFA Yahoo also said it had partnered with a Turkish firm, Vestel to bring Yahoo Connected TV to 40 more countries from early 2011.