Web search king Google has debuted its risky attempt to marry the web to television and reach the $70 billion TV advertising market, chasing a dream that has eluded even archrival Apple.
Developers at a conference last night applauded "Google TV", and a slew of tech industry titans, including microchip maker Intel and TV maker Sony, sent their chief executives to announce that they had joined the project and that TV sets would be ready in time for Christmas buying.
The key to Google TV is an on-screen search box, just like on Google's website. The TV search box accesses Google's search engine to look through live programs, DVR recordings and the web, delivering a relatively compact list of results that can be accessed with a push of the button.
Internet television has been a minefield for the world's most creative and deep-pocketed companies, and in a sign of the challenge, embarrassed Google engineers struggled initially to get their TV running, asking the audience to turn off their mobile phones, which were interfering with TV remote controls.
Sony will build devices, marketed as Sony internet TVs, to launch in the United States in the autumn - in time for the 2010 holiday season - with Intel providing its small Atom processors to run machines. Sony did not release pricing and said it had not decided on plans for the TVs in other markets.
Logitech International also will create a Google TV appliance that can work with current high-definition TVs.
Television represents an attractive market in which to expand Google's internet advertising business, which generated the bulk of its $23.7 billion in 2009 revenue.
Walkman creator Sony has seen its dominance in electronics eroded and has been looking for new technology, including 3D, to improve TV sales.
"Video should be consumed on the biggest, best and brightest screen in the house. And that's a TV. It's not a PC or a phone or anything else in between," said Google project senior product manager Rishi Chandra.
Google executives said previous efforts had failed because they dumbed down the web for television, were closed to participation by others, and made people choose between using the web or television.
"It's much harder to marry a 50-year-old technology and a brand new technology than those of us in the brand new technology industry thought," Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acknowledged to the audience of developers.
TV presents a potential new audience for the trove of online videos that Google offers through its website YouTube, which demonstrated yesterday a new service called Lean Back designed to create automated video playlists for Google TV users.
A YouTube spokesman said the content currently available on YouTube would also be available to consumers surfing the web with the browser on Google TV, but that it was still determining what exactly would be on the Lean Back service.
Reuters