Originally published May 18, 2010. Edited on Jun 27, 2026.
The piece Google is launching this week is one of the biggest bets the company has ever made outside search. Whether it works is the question the next two years will answer. The reasons it might not are already visible.
Google TV — announced at I/O and arriving in stores via Sony and Logitech later this year — is Google’s attempt to do what nobody has done: get the web onto the television set in a way actual customers will use. The architecture is Android. The hardware partners are Sony (integrated TVs and Blu-ray players) and Logitech (a $299 set-top box called the Revue). The processor is Intel’s Atom CE4100, the company’s first chip designed specifically for the living room. The browser is Chrome. The apps platform is Android. The content layer is — and this is where the bet gets interesting — whoever Google can convince to play.
What’s actually being shipped
Strip away the keynote energy and Google TV is doing three things at once.
First, it’s putting a full Chrome browser on the TV. You can search the open web, watch any video on YouTube, run Pandora, check Twitter, and do everything else you do on a laptop, on a screen ten feet away. The interface is keyboard-driven. The Logitech Revue ships with a full QWERTY keyboard. Sony’s televisions ship with a smaller one.
Second, it’s adding Android apps to that television. The Android Market won’t be live at launch but is the longer-term thesis. Developers will write apps for the TV the way they write apps for the phone. Some of those apps will be media — Netflix, Pandora, NBA League Pass. Some will be Facebook and Twitter. Some will be whatever the developer community invents.
Third, it’s surfacing search across all that content at once. Type in the name of a show and Google TV is supposed to find it for you, regardless of whether it lives on cable, on Netflix, on YouTube, or on a network’s own site. That is the headline feature. It is also the feature that depends entirely on the networks deciding to cooperate.
The networks haven’t decided to cooperate
This is the structural problem the keynote does not solve. Most television content available online — the NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox catalog — is hosted at Hulu or on the networks’ own sites. Both blocked the unreleased Google TV beta software the moment they figured out how to detect it. The networks’ fear is straightforward: they sell affiliate ad inventory at one rate to advertisers who think they are reaching cable viewers and at a different, lower rate to advertisers who know they are reaching online viewers. Google TV blurs that distinction. The networks have every reason to block it.
Until the networks open the catalog — or Google reaches a deal that pays them for the access — the universal-search feature will deliver an asymmetric experience. YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon will work. The actual prime-time television Americans watch will not.
The remote control problem
The second structural problem is the keyboard. Watching television is a passive activity. The current remote control has eight buttons and people complain about that. Google TV is asking the customer to navigate a full operating system with a 92-key QWERTY keyboard on the coffee table. Sony’s smaller version is more compact but still a keyboard. Apple, which has its own television strategy and a much smaller remote, has been deliberate about not putting a keyboard in the living room. They are not stupid people. The keyboard is a bet that customers want desktop-style interaction on the television. The previous twenty years of television suggest they want the opposite.
What it’s competing against
Google TV is the most ambitious of the current crop of internet-to-TV products. Apple TV — refreshed earlier this year — is the opposite: small box, small remote, curated iTunes content, no browser. Roku is selling a $79 box that streams Netflix and a growing list of channels. The cable boxes that come from Comcast and Time Warner are getting smarter and starting to absorb on-demand content. Hulu Plus is launching its own subscription service. The market is crowded. Each competitor is making a different bet about what the customer actually wants.
Google’s bet is that the customer wants everything. Apple’s bet is that the customer wants curation. Roku’s bet is that the customer wants cheap. The bet that wins will depend on whether the customer, two years from now, finds typing on the couch worth doing.
What success would look like
If Google TV works, it will be because three things broke right.
One: the networks decide that participating in Google TV is better than fighting it. Probably under a revenue-share arrangement that lets them maintain their pricing model.
Two: the developer community builds enough Android TV apps to make the platform meaningful beyond what the browser alone provides.
Three: the customers prove the keyboard skeptics wrong. They actually use search and apps on the television, and the keyboard does not become the joke that current critics expect it to become.
If any of those three breaks the wrong way, Google TV becomes a footnote. The next attempt — Google’s or someone else’s — will come a few years later and learn from what this one got wrong.
For now, the announcement is the biggest swing anyone has taken at the television set since color. Whether the swing connects depends on factors Google does not entirely control.
Written by
EPR Editorial Team
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
