GoogleTV Coming Soon?

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Posted by ryuzaki0 on Thursday September 22, 2005 @08:10AM from the looking-pretty-official dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Flexbeta writes that Google is looking to hire a full time project manager for GoogleTV in Mountain View, CA. The candidate must posses experience developing/launching products in one or more of the following areas: interactive TV, set-top-boxes, personal video recorders, video-on-demand, IP TV or cable TV technologies. Google recently announced their interest in the text messaging market by releasing GoogleTalk; this came to no surprise to many that were already hearing rumors month's before GoogleTalk was released. Google is also working on providing free WiFi service to some regions of the San Francisco bay area. Google is without a doubt expanding their operations beyond the search engine market which makes the possibility of GoogleTV realistic. "

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stimtv... by Anonymous Coward · 2005-09-22 08:12 · Score: 5, Interesting

hmmm some other people are working on the whole internet tv stuff...http://www.stimtv.com/
TiVo Competition by mysqlrocks · 2005-09-22 08:13 · Score: 5, Interesting

personal video recorders, video-on-demand
Sounds like TiVo is going to have some more competition.

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Bradley Holt
They should just buy... by bc90021 · 2005-09-22 08:13 · Score: 4, Interesting

...this company.

Disclaimer: I don't work there, but I did interview there.

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libertarianswag.com
The crawling chaos, Nyarletgoogle? by Cyclometh · 2005-09-22 08:14 · Score: 4, Interesting

Crazy. And people compare Microsoft to the Borg. What's next, GoogleLaundromat? GoogleBeer? (beer Googles?)

The mind, it boggles.
perfect timing. by admactanium · 2005-09-22 08:21 · Score: 5, Interesting

oddly enough, i just theorized this plan yesterday over lunch with a friend of mine. being in advertising, i can see the potential here. in much the same way google delivers "unobtrusive" ads in their search engine, they can delivery custom long-form video content with banners or logo bugs in them. the major cost of television is the broadcast and the infrastructure needed. that's why you see television being run by very few large corporations. once you minimize the difficulty of distribution, the production costs of MOST tv content is quite low. the cost of a 30-second tv commercial can run into the millions. if you can use that money all in production for long-form content and only a fraction of it for distribution, then you have great potential in the world of marketing.
in the end, i also think it will IMPROVE a lot of content. since nobody really wants to download an infomercial, the content will have to be interesting/informative to make it worthwhile. for those of us in media, we should buckle up, because the whole paradigm is about to change.
Hmmm by Reality+Master+101 · 2005-09-22 08:48 · Score: 4, Interesting

Makes we wonder... yep.

$ whois googlemusic.com
Registrant:
Google Inc. (DOM-1314687)
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View CA 94043 US

Domain Name: googlemusic.com

Registrar Name: Markmonitor.com
Registrar Whois: whois.markmonitor.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.markmonitor.com/

Administrative Contact:
DNS Admin (NIC-1467103) Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View CA 94043 US
dns-admin@google.com +1.6502530000 Fax- +1.6506188571
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
DNS Admin (NIC-1467103) Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View CA 94043 US
dns-admin@google.com +1.6502530000 Fax- +1.6506188571

Created on..............: 2003-Feb-13.
Expires on..............: 2008-Feb-13.
Record last updated on..: 2004-Nov-01 09:49:36.

Makes me wonder if eventually Google might do their own music distribution service. Not sure how it could succeed much better than the other music services, but you never know. Of course, this was registered way back in 11/2001, so they may have been grabbing domains as they thought of anything.

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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Re:DRM? by Kimos · 2005-09-22 08:55 · Score: 4, Interesting

I work for a Canadian Telco that's just making the move into digital TV. The reason we're in the middle of implementing DRM on our network is so that we can expand the content we can provide. Most of the larger providers won't sell to us unless we sign a contract with them saying that their content locked and managed when it is sent out to customers. If Google goes DRM-free it would seriously limit what they would be able to provide...
Re:DRM? by Dominatus · 2005-09-22 09:29 · Score: 4, Interesting

Files on iTunes are compressed. CDs are digital, considerably higher quality, and DRMless. The compromise should be that Im paying almost as much as a real CD for compressed music in a non-tangible form. It should NOT and I repeat NOT restrict what music player I can play it on, forcing me to sacrifice quality if I want to play what I bought on a non-iPod.
Re:DRM? by Peter+La+Casse · 2005-09-22 10:06 · Score: 4, Interesting

DRM is the compromise the consumer makes to have available to them a quality digital version of a work. Without DRM, there is no incentive for the artist to provide the digital version, as DRM'less digital versions can be immediately redistributed.

Less incentive? Sure. Necessary to perpetuate the current content distribution paradigm? Sure. But no incentive? None at all? Without DRM, nobody would ever create any digital content?
That's a stretch. See http://www.bradsucks.net/ for a counterexample.
A good DRM scheme is one where the consumer's ability to use the work in the manner they wish isn't impacted while the ability to simply redistribute millions of copies is curtailed.

"Good" DRM appears to be impossible, or at least not invented yet, by my standards. Here's how I wish to use digital media: I want to store it on my file server and access it on whatever device I happen to be sitting in front of at the moment. I want to be able to access it with a variety of programs, and when it's out of copyright (I'm an optimist) I want to be able to manipulate it to my heart's content with a variety of tools that I'm able to apt-get (or write myself, if I'm ever so inclined.) I want to be able to access it locally even when my internet connection is down, and even when the content provider I acquired it from goes out of business / stops making content / decides they don't want me to access the content any more. (I don't enter into contracts that give the content provider that power.)
Tivo + Slingbox is close. MythTV is close. CD music has been there for years.