January 10, 2008 | Thursday
Google, Yahoo & TV
By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in News |Search Engines |Google |Yahoo
This week is the Consumer Electronics Show, the Christmas-in-January for geeks and gadget anoraks around the world who descend on Las Vegas like locusts every year, just for this. At CES, major products are launched and many demos and presentations given - such as Bill Gates’ last ever CES keynote, complete with cringe-making celebrity cameos.
Narrator: He’s even got a personal trainer.
Bill Gates: Am I ready to take my shirt off??
Matthew McConaughey: Erm, not yet…
Apart from Panasonic’s 150 inch plasma screen, CES has been roundly declared a snoozefest this year. So it is little wonder that one of the most interesting consumer electronics stories that emerged this week came not from the Vegas confab, but from a Tokyo press room.
Could the long-rumoured GoogleTV be closer on the horizon than thought?
Matsushita, the world’s largest consumer electronics manufacturer, [which] produces Panasonic TVs, expects to start shipping Internet-enabled plasma TVs capable of viewing YouTube and Picasa Web Albums this spring.
As Tony Ruscoe points out in his post, TVs and set top boxes with built-in internet access and browsers are nothing new. So how exactly will the Panasonic/Google offering go one better? It is safe to assume that the search giant is far too clever to simply slap its recognisable, trusted brand name on anything as average as what has come before. If there’s anything we’ve come to expect from Google, it’s something markedly different.
But they’re not the only telly-minded search company. Yahoo will soon premiere its tech news online show/blog combo, which will run 10-20 original live news segments per day, and loop archived footage when not streaming.
This may well make for compelling viewing, but it’s a bit ho hum compared to what Google may have up its sleeve with their step into the hardware side of things.
At least one web guru has big ideas about how Yahoo really could make waves with a full-scale dive into TV. Dave Winer, who pioneered blogging, podcasting, and RSS, says that Yahoo should buy or merge with a TV network. His epiphany was brought about by constant monitoring of different media coverage of US election-related events:
...I’m glued to the TV, but I’m also on Twitter, and blogging, and email, and IM and I’m subscribed to hundreds of RSS feeds, and I’ve been noticing that slowly the TV news organizations are integrating new Internet services with their TV offerings. They’re all getting started, and eventually I’m pretty sure they’ll be where Yahoo is now. The thing is, it works. For example, newmediajim is a cameraman for NBC News and he’s on Twitter and sometimes I’m watching the other side of his camera on MSNBC and twittering with him before and after. A guy named creepsleepy is a radio guy in Manchester, interviewing presidential candidates, wouldn’t it be great if I could listen to his interviews while he twitters his progress? Well, there’s no doubt that soon we’ll be doing that.
We’re finally really at the convergence so many have predicted for so long...Yahoo can get there first.
But is Yahoo really serious about opening up to the developers who can help them to achieve this convergence? As Winer notes regarding the New York Times story claiming that the company intends to do just that:
If you want to impress end-users and shareholders run [the story] in [mainstream media]. If you want to get through to developers, use the developer blogs. Let us have the story first, otherwise you don’t seem very serious about it.
From the sound of things, Google won’t be going to the developer community for help with its TV projects. Perhaps this is where Yahoo can gain an edge. Whether they are serious about doing so remains to be seen.
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