Sony/Google TV Partnership Puts OEMs, MVPDs in 'Difficult Position,' TDG Says

Sony’s new line of smart TVs incorporating Google Assistant “is a harbinger of things to come,” and the TV industry will have to figure out its stance in a world where Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft dominate the voice-controlled visual assistant market, The Diffusion Group (TDG) Senior Adviser Joel Espelien said in a TDG blog post Wednesday. TDG said the Sony/Google partnership puts TV original equipment manufacturers and multichannel video programming distributors “in a difficult position,” with three options: develop their own voice search capabilities, coalesce around Google as the industry standard search engine, or divide up teams and align with one or more of the voice assistants. TDG was dismissive of Comcast’s development of voice search capabilities for its X1 platform: “Voice search limited to a single service (or device) is a classic stovepipe solution” since consumers want to “search for anything across any service.” Coalescing around Google levels the search playing field among legacy participants but hands Google “the keys to the $70 billion US TV advertising market,” TDG said. Teams of OEMs and multichannel video programming distributors aligning with various voice assistants seem inevitable, it said, with one result being content providers would have big incentives to provide application programming interface support to all the voice assistants.