GoogleTV Coming Soon?

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. "

Comments

DRM?

[rovingeyes]

So I hope their content will be DRM free, right?

Re:DRM?

[Kimos]

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?

[Chyeld]

DRM is not inheritantly evil. Unreasonably restrictive DRM is evil.

I have no problem with iTune's Fairplay implementation, and I have every confidence that Google would be able to come up with something just as good in terms of comprimise between the content producer and the consumer.

Re:DRM?

[MikeFM]

DRM is evil. It controls how the consumer can use what they've fairly bought. It makes it more difficult for other artists to sample and extend works. It makes it less likely that content will still be accessible to future generations.

If not evil then at least short-sighted and selfish.

Re:DRM?

[Chyeld]

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.

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.

iTunes' implementation of Fairplay is such a system in my eyes. Yes, the AAC files are protected. But you can authorize up to five computers to play them, you can stream the music over the network, you can even reduce the quality of the file by burning it to CD and then re-ripping it into a DRM'less version.

As many people bitch about the fact that the music industry not adapting to the new age of digital (which I whole heartedly agree with), a lot people still seem stuck in the whole "Tape" generation of thinking where copies weren't detrimental because they never came close to the quality of the original. That isn't true anymore and you need to stop acting as if it were. Unauthorized copies, while not as a horrible threat as the suits want to make it seem, are a problem.

It doesn't take a white beard and half a century of experience in the world to realize that anytime you have a setup that depends on everyone playing along, a setup where one person can screw it up for the rest of us, that not only is that person going to exist but they are going to make it their goal in life to screw it up just to be an A-hole.

Your goals should not be to stamp out DRM but to work to find a setup where both sides of the equation feel as if they have gotten a fair trade out of the deal.

Re:DRM?

[Dominatus]

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?

[Hans Lehmann]

Who defines "unreasonable". You can bet it will be them, and not you.

Re:DRM?

[Chyeld]

Your first statement contradicts your second. If AAC files are of lesser quality than a CD, then converting them to CD to be able to play them where ever (which iTunes allows) would not reduce the quality of the file.

If AAC files are of a greater quality then a CD, then your first argument that you are paying the same price as a CD is meaningless.

The fact of the matter is iTunes DOES allow you to burn to CD. So anytime you wish to remove the DRM, you can do so. And if you truly wished to do so, you could even use a program such as Playfair or Hymn to allow you to remove the DRM without converting the file in anyway whatsoever.

People who complain about something as lax as iTunes' version of Fairplay are the ones who are never going to 'get it'.

The WHOLE point of copyrights was to assure the author that their works would not be stolen enmass as soon as they were released. In the world before digital, this was fairly simple. Copies were either guaranteed to be of lesser quality than the original or would require so much effort to create that there were few who would find the work and risk of punishment worth doing.

That is NO LONGER TRUE. Anyone can rip off a work if it's not protected and just as the RIAA has unwittingly proven, there is no way you can possibly catch everyone doing it once it gets to that point.

You need to wake up and realize, just as the music and movie industries need to, that the world has changed and sitting there bitching about how it's so unfair that they expect you to compromise is the equivalent of the RIAA sitting around bitching about how the internet is killing the music industry.

You are both stuck in the old world analog view of life.

Re:DRM?

[Peter La Casse]

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.

Re:DRM?

[pavon]

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.

If there is no incentive without DRM then there should also be no incentive with it. Because DRM is a myth.

DRM only restricts people who own legally obtained copies from using them in non-approved manners. It can do nothing to prevent people with illegally obtained copies from using or distributing the work. Furthermore, it can do nothing to prevent people who have legally obtained copies from converting them to non-DRM form.

This is because unbreakable DRM is theoretically impossible. Every DRM scheme ever created has been broken shortly after it became widely used, and once a single person breaks the DRM on a work then you are back to where you started.

Therefore, the restrictions enforced by DRM are inherently limited to those who chose to obey the law to begin with, while it is no barrier those who choose to infringe on copyright.

DRM is compromise - a compromise where the consumer agrees to give up his fair-use rights, the electronic companies agree to complicate thier products, and in return none of the parties, media producer included, get anything of value in return.

Sorry, but that is not the kind of compromise that I want to make.

stimtv...

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmm some other people are working on the whole internet tv stuff...http://www.stimtv.com/

TiVo Competition

[mysqlrocks]

personal video recorders, video-on-demand

Sounds like TiVo is going to have some more competition.

They should just buy...

[bc90021]

...this company.

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

First TV, then movies, books, radio, etc.

[Jubalicious]

I for one welcome our new Google overlords...

The crawling chaos, Nyarletgoogle?

[Cyclometh]

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

The mind, it boggles.

Re:The crawling chaos, Nyarletgoogle?

[deathcloset]

I'm thinking that next comes GoogleGoogle, which lets you search google like never before!

Re:The crawling chaos, Nyarletgoogle?

[hungrygrue]

No, next is google beta beta - It will be a search engine to find all of the various google beta services like google mail, google news, google maps, google local, google scholar, google wireless, google tv, google mobile, etc. etc.

Re:The crawling chaos, Nyarletgoogle?

[hungrygrue]

Oh hea, I forgot: google secure access, google desktop search, google print, google personalized homepage, google personalized search, google web accelerator, google ride finder, google suggest, froogle, google compute, and (wtf?) google sets...

Splitting hairs, I know

[Xarius]

Google recently announced their interest in the text messaging market by releasing GoogleTalk;

But that should really read "Instant Messaging" since Text Messaging, at least in the UK, is synonymous with SMS on mobile telephones,

unless GoogleTalk does this?

Re:Splitting hairs, I know

[screevo]

Ever try sending a text message to GOOGL and asking it for information? It works. Google DOES do SMS messaging searches.

online or over-the-air

[NetMagi]

I wonder if this station would be over-the-air or over-the-net?

Given their popularity and success of almost everything else they're launched, if they were to launch an on-line tv station with quality content I think they'd have a real shot to be in line with other major networks in a short while.

More background: research from 2003

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw this mentioned over on GMSV earlier today. The author of the post mentioned a 2003 Google research paper that makes for pretty interesting reading. Here's an excerpt:

Many daily activities present information using a written or spoken stream of words: television, radio, telephone calls, meetings, face-to-face conversations with others. Often people can benefit from additional information about the topics that are being discussed. Supplementing television broadcasts is particularly attractive because of the passive nature of TV watching. Interaction is severely constrained, usually limited to just changing the channel; there is no way to more finely direct what kind of information will be presented.

Indeed, several companies have explored suggesting web pages to viewers as they watch TV. For example, the Intercast system, developed by Intel, allows entire HTML pages to be broadcast in unused portions of the TV signal. A user watching TV on a computer with a compatible TV tuner card can then view these pages, even without an Internet connection. NBC transmitted pages via Intercast during their coverage of the 1996 Summer Olympics. The Interactive TV Links system, developed by VITAC (a closed captioning company) and WebTV (now a division of Microsoft), broadcasts URLs in an alternative data channel interleaved with closed caption data [17,2]. When a WebTV box detects one of these URLs, it displays an icon on the screen; if the user chooses to view the page, the WebTV box fetches it over the Internet.

For both of these systems the producer of a program (or commercial) chooses relevant documents by hand. In fact, the producer often creates new documents specifically to be accessed by TV viewers. To our knowledge, there has been no previous work on automatically selecting web pages that a user might want to see while watching a TV program.

In this paper we study the problem of finding news articles on the web relevant to the ongoing stream of TV broadcast news. We restrict our attention to broadcast news since it is very popular and information-oriented (as supposed to entertainment-oriented).

Re:G...

[Red Flayer]

"I bow to your superior intallect" (emphasis mine)

Apparently, truer words have never been spoken. :)

perfect timing.

[admactanium]

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.

google for your google

[m0rphin3]

In the words of the immortal comment (seems like the first occurrence): "In a few years you'll be driving your google to the google to buy some google for your google."

Re:google for your google

[TheRaven64]

Pah! I fully intend to google my google to the google to google some google for my google.

TY, Captain Obvious

[Red Flayer]

"Google is without a doubt expanding their operations beyond the search engine market which makes the possibility of GoogleTV realistic."

Other than the fact that absolutley no one should be surprised by this...

Search engines are not Google's market. Search engines are Google's clients' market. Google sells advertising, and search engines are one of their delivery mechanisms. Previously on Slashdot, Google print ads have been discussed.

It's really just horizontal expansion. Online advertising, print advertising, and now television (and you can bet they'll be delivering ads) -- what about radio?

ICrave(g)TV?

[Bob Loblaw]

They should hire the ICraveTV guy who got clobbered by the entertainment industry lawyers years ago. He was ahead of the times and had a very functional IPTV system going. Maybe Google has the money to protect the concept this time.

TV Guide

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I'd say a TV guide style service that also doubles as a scheduling service for PVRs would be right up their alley for starters. Lots of people want to know what time TV shows are playing, and what an episode is about. Making it easy, fast, and searchable would be better than any of the others I've seen lately. I use TitanTV to do scheduling with my PVR right now, but I'd be happy to look at a google alternative. Maybe some of the ads would be targeted at things that actually interest me or are related to the shows I'm looking up. I'd also bet a number of Google employees have MythTV boxes at home they'd love to have a great scheduling service for, ala Tivo, especially if it included suggestions based upon the shows you already watch.

Anyway, that is my prediction. I don't think it is likely Tivo will release a hardware box anytime soon, although it would be great to have another credible competitor in that space. A google branded MythTV box with a simple and easy UI could be a real winner. TV over IP is also a fast moving space with amateur video podcasts and DTV both starting to have content I actually like to watch. Still, my bet is on the first idea, an online TV guide and PVR scheduling service. It seems to fit their MO the best.

Will anybody want to buy...

[fm6]

...a set-top box that's in beta for 5 years?

Seriously though. Except for their original search engine, Google hasn't done that well bringing new products to market. They keep introducing cool features and web applications. But major new products? Nada.

And no, I'm not forgetting Google Earth or Picasa. Both of which they acquired.

Hmmm

[Reality Master 101]

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.

Microsoft TV inevitable

[wardk]

sheesh, now MS is going to have to rule TV too, having that bad case of google envy.

I anticipate the announcment of a totally rock solid vapor TV that will ship with Tinhorn.

Getting hot in here...

[Hosiah]

I sure am glad Google isn't evil, because God are they ever getting *BIG*.

If they turn to the darkside, we're all screwed.

An Interesting MSoft/Google Comparison

[chia_monkey]

Here's an interesting thought. Both Microsoft and Google have made loads of money doing their thing. However, each company has decided to go about their lives in completely different ways as they amass their fortures.

Microsoft got loaded after they achieved their market dominance. What did they do with their money? They put some into R&D. They bought some companies out.

Google came along and made their loads of money too. And they too have bought a few companies. But here's where the differences are. Microsoft simply wanted to protect their monopoly. They bought companies they they saw as threats or companies that they thought would help them maintain their monopoly. Google on the other hand seems to have been exploring with their money, putting it into the "cool" technologies that are still just outside the threshold of everyday consumers. It's as if Google is trying to pull it into the mainstream. It's these fringe technologies that Google is going after and preparing to assert their mark.

Thoughts? Comments?

Pick me! Pick me!

[glamslam]

I once put together a MythTV box that I built from scratch!

GoogleBigBrother

[Duncan3]

In soviet Russia... the government watches everything you do 24/7 and kills you when you write bad stories about them.

Here we have Google for that.