Commentary

Vague Future For Google TV After Microsoft Launches IE Access On Xbox

Google-TVA consistent experience for online advertising and access to content across channels became Google CEO Larry Page's mantra during the company's Q3 2012 earnings call Thursday.

Marketers know it's the only way to serve and target ads across channels and devices. It means extending search services to support operating systems, applications, and hardware. Aside from Nexus 7 smartphones, the company started taking preorders for a hard drive-less (for docs) Samsung Chromebook Thursday.

Page talked about a "seamless experience" from mobile to desktop to TV. Given Microsoft's announcement this week that the company added access to Internet Explorer through the Xbox 360 dashboard, I thought it would be important to highlight. I also thought Google would believe it was important -- but it danced around the service, providing very little detail on its future.

Unfortunately, the vagueness of Page's three- to-five-year vision for Google TV describes recent videos of dancing horses, which he notes as having between 400 million and 500 million views, adding that it's "a great time to have a real browser, mail on your television, easily access You Tube and all those kind of things." It's a little disappointing to think his vision for Google TV consists of dancing horses and access to Gmail.

Earlier this week, Google TV expanded into Korea through a television subscription service with the local provider LG Uplus. A blog post describes the deal, which received little attention, making Korea the tenth country to offer the platform. A YouTube star becomes the spokesman for the LG Uplus ad campaign.

The announcement follows Google's decision to connect Google TV to the Playstore, which allows users to store and download movies and television shows directly to Google TV. It also gives viewing access to purchases made on other connected devices. 

1 comment about "Vague Future For Google TV After Microsoft Launches IE Access On Xbox".
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  1. aaron stigberg from kenshoo, October 22, 2012 at 3:10 p.m.

    That's not just a YouTube star--that's Psy!

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