What is Google TV?

As with any exciting new technology, it isn’t always clear what it actually does. The goal of Google TV is to turn television and web into a seamless experience, giving you access to online content and videos from the comfort of your living room.

Google puts it this way: the traditional way to watch a television show is to wait for it to air on a network, meaning you change your schedule to match that of the show you want to watch.  The internet breaks that barrier, allowing you to watch shows whenever you feel like through outlets like Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube.

With Google TV, you can watch online content out of the confined space of your computer’s monitor and instead play it on your TV ““ together with standard TV content.

Getting Google TV
Google is working with companies like Sony and LG to integrate Google TV into televisions and BluRay players which will be available exclusively through Best Buy.  If you alredy have a TV or BluRay player, you can instead purchase an external Google TV box that will connect to your TV via an HDMI connection.  The great news: the Google TV service will be offered completely free (minus the cost of hardware)Future plans have also been announced that Google TV will integrate with video game consoles, like Netflix has done.

Google TV first reviews unenthusiastic
The first mainstream reviews of Google’s new TV product have crticised usability and content

The New York Times and the Wall Street Journals main technology reviewers have written largely negative reviews of Google’s attempt to merge the web and television.

David Pogue, writing in the New York Times, said that “on the great timeline of television history, Google TV takes an enormous step in the wrong direction: toward complexity.” Walt Mossberg, on the Wall Street Journal’s All Things D, said that the “search-and-viewing process was frustrating – but this is a 1.0 product”.

The reviews will be a blow to Google’s ambitions, but both writers suggest that initial problems are a mixture of hardware, software and content, and indicate that they have not yet written off Google’s entire TV product.

“It’s all customizable, unfamiliar and mostly baffling, and you don’t get a single page of instructions”, wrote Pogue, who went on to ask “do we really want to pay hundreds of dollars to bring this sort of flakiness to our TV sets?” He left the door open, however, to improvements, saying, “It will probably take a long time, and a lot more refinement, before Google TV is attractive to anyone besides tech-heads”.

Mossberg was marginally more positive: “Google TV has its strong points. The integration of web video and regular TV, while flawed, is a smart move,” he said.