Google TV Lapses Seen As Challenge Typifying Next-Gen CE Products

Google TV missed the boat in first-generation products that launched in October by not understanding what the consumer wants, said panelists at the NexGen Entertainment Home Experience panel at the Digital Hollywood 2011 Media Summit in Manhattan Wednesday. The platform should come back strong in subsequent generations, assuming Google addresses issues that limited its appeal the first time out, panelists said. But Google’s stab at an undefined, fast-moving target shows how far the entertainment industry has to go in defining the home entertainment experience of the future.

Roger Pavane, senior vice president of payment service provider PaymentOne, called the first take of Google TV “too little, too late.” Pavane said Google TV offers no additional value to consumers who want Internet-based content through their TV. “All the services from that home server box have already been duplicated by the ad hoc devices consumers already own,” he said. He acknowledged that multiple HDMI inputs and switching were a bonus of Google TV, but not at the expense of having to “make another capital investment of $300-$500."

Google TV’s text search approach using a remote control is “totally wrong for TV,” said Dale Roberts, chief technology officer for Gracenote, who said a tablet would have been a better interface. “The best you can do with a $50 remote control isn’t anything compared with what you can do with an iPad or a smartphone today,” he said. Although “they did a lot of things right,” including multiple OTT service options, there were “basic user interface problems,” he said. Lack of a social media component through Facebook was another drawback, he said.

By offering consumers another set-top box, Google TV “is going in the wrong direction,” said Travis Parsons, vice president of corporate development at Sezmi, which offers a hybrid broadcast/niche Internet content solution. “Consumers want fewer boxes” and “one solution,” and none of the next-gen services, “whether it’s Google TV, Apple TV, or Netflix,” are offering the complete package that consumers want, which includes broadcast TV, he said. Live, over-the-air TV “still represents 50-plus percent of the most popular content out there,” he said.

Describing a “step-by-step” process that’s more “hits than misses,” Gregg Bernard, senior vice president of business development for Vimeo, said content providers viewed Google TV as a first-generation product with “a lot of trial-and-error going on.” He compared it to Sony’s DASH personal Internet viewer that taps into cloud-based content and has no onboard storage. “I don’t think it’s resonating with consumers yet, but cloud-based content distribution is the future,” he said.

Regarding the possibility of version 2.0 Google TV, Roberts said Google should “ditch” the console controller and instead release an iPad app for control. Overall, he said, because Google TV is a software platform, “it should be able to improve quite a bit.” The supporting hardware from Sony and Logitech is solid, he said.

Navigating services is another obstacle the next Google TV product has to solve, said Timothy Dodd, vice president and general manager of Neustar Media. A navigation service has to be handled in a way that takes into account the investment that’s been made in the content. A challenge will be to present all the content consumers have access to while “preserving the primacy of the network presentation that it’s CBS’s property or Sony’s property” and not mashed up in some “amalgam bucket,” Dodd said. The various silos of content are “the biggest issue” Google has to overcome, he said.

Bert Hesselink, chief technology officer of Western Digital, believes Google will come to market with an Android-based product that will allow consumers to find content on whatever device they want using search, metadata and other methods. Today, there’s a bit of “chaos” with many boxes in the home providing access to the same content but Hesselink sees the number of boxes shrinking. In 1980, he said, there were 129 companies selling storage solutions. “Now there are four. It’s going to be exactly the same story with these boxes,” he said. “The company that finds the content and integrates it in a very simple way for consumers is going to win.”