Funny. TiVo wants to be the Google of television… but so does Google.
What Google did for the Internet, TiVo is now doing for the TV, bringing people a combination of excellent search results and innovative discovery that can’t be found anywhere else. -Tom Rogers, TiVo CEO
At Google’s annual developer conference yesterday, they elaborated on their television intentions – beyond the spring soundbite. As you might expect given Google’s search DNA and the appification of everything, Google TV supports both. And, taking a page from Yahoo’s Widget TV initiative, Google intends to work with a variety of hardware manufacturers to deliver Google TV.
For starters, we know DISH is onboard for some sort of satellite television integration and Sony will provide at least one connected television and Google TV-ed Blu-ray player. Logitech’s doing something too. (Huh, using Google TV as a remote control for TiVo?) The first devices are expected to hit this fall, at which point I’ll probably have more to say.
While it’s a commendable goal to bring web content to the TV in a manageable way (like a variety of others, say Boxee), the best web video originated on television or in theaters. I don’t need access to thousands of websites serving random content of varying quality. It’s the same reason many of us want Hulu everywhere. We don’t care about “Hulu” per se, but we do care about that large catalog of professionally crafted content. The future of TV is… TV. I’ll let Mari sum it up for me:
Click to enlarge: (via BGR):