Android TVs Will Triumph In The Market

Every TV at IFA had some kind of widget or something built in.  Most of them are proprietary widgets - companies like Netflix paying generously to make sure they get featured on these devices.  But these proprietary widgets have limited value because they operate in relatively closed TV company ecosystems.

Most of the "Apps" that thrive in the TV ecosystems are just wrappers for other web services.  They package H.264 video or HTML data in ways that work nicely in the TV environment.  The cost of developing these simple wrappers is not too high: say $30-50k of developer time for most companies.  The problem is the enormous proliferation of these services, each with different terms & conditions.

We all know, or we all think we know, that somehow, someway, over-the-top content and services will take hold in the television environment.  We just don't know which ones.  It's a bit like the iPhone.  It's easy to forget that when the iPhone launched, there wasn't really a provision for Apps.  Apps came later, and they came only after intense demand from users.  And even when Apple offered up the App store, nobody was sure in advance what kinds of apps would thrive.

We do not know what the magic set of applications is yet for TVs.  Will people want games even if they're not console quality?  Will they want music or video or will they keep getting that from their cable companies while seeking out something else online?  With so many choices emerging in online video, I think search alone is a big opportunity.

With so many platforms out there, even $30k per platform quickly becomes prohibitive for all but the largest companies to spend on a speculative venture.  Enter Google TV.  You can write an app for Google TV and it will work across multiple companies systems.  Better yet, it will also work on Google tablets and Android smartphones.  And the open nature of the Google environment means no arbitrary rejections either.

As a result, in a matter of months, I believe we will see more apps for Google TVs than there are for every other TV platform out there.  Combined.  The massive momentum of the Google developer community will power this platform forward even as the cost of chipsets keeps coming down.  Many manufacturers have passed on Google TV because it costs a lot in CPU power (Flash and all!) but that may turn out to have been a false economy.

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