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

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.

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: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.

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: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.