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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. "
hmmm some other people are working on the whole internet tv stuff...http://www.stimtv.com/
personal video recorders, video-on-demand
Sounds like TiVo is going to have some more competition.Bradley Holt
...this company.
Disclaimer: I don't work there, but I did interview there.
libertarianswag.com
Crazy. And people compare Microsoft to the Borg. What's next, GoogleLaundromat? GoogleBeer? (beer Googles?)
The mind, it boggles.
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?
C17H21NO4
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).
"I bow to your superior intallect" (emphasis mine)
:)
Apparently, truer words have never been spoken.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
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."
for great justice
"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?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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...
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.
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.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.