(Another) One bites the dust: Boxee sold to Samsung

Yesterday, over-the-top Internet set-top box maker Boxee confirmed that it had been acquired by Samsung. The rumored acquisition price was around $30 million--about the same amount as the company raised in venture financing, meaning that at best, investors got their money back. According to VentureBeat, Boxee will continue to support owners of Boxee Box and Boxee TV devices "for the immediate future," but Boxee's Cloud DVR service will be discontinued on July 10th and recorded television shows will be deleted.

Samsung has been one of the biggest potential customers for set-top box technology companies such as Google and Roku. Now, it's very likely that Samsung will integrate Boxee's technology into future HDTVs, Blu-Ray players and other devices. For Roku in particular, the number of companies that are both likely to integrate its technology into their devices and are big enough to represent a major business opportunity are dwindling. Sony and Vizio are already Google licensees, and Samsung is now on board with Boxee. Panasonic, Sharp and LG are still in play, but beyond them, the remaining players are second- and third-tier brands.

I'm still not convinced that there's a broad market for standalone Internet set-top boxes. Boxee couldn't find one, Google's licensees are struggling, Apple TV is supposedly beyond the "hobby" stage (but not far beyond) and Roku is putting more emphasis on its "streaming stick" and software licensing deals than its set-top boxes. As much as I like the idea of over-the-top video, unless Apple or Intel can come up with something both revolutionary and highly desirable, Internet video will remain a "second screen" application for PCs, tablets and smartphones.

Reality bites: Google replaces Intel with Marvell for Google TV

Earlier today, The Wall Street Journal reported that Marvell has replaced Intel as the lead chipset supplier for Google TV. The deal is non-exclusive, but the bigger news is that Google has replaced Intel's X86 architecture with ARM, which is supported by Broadcom, nVidia, Samsung and Texas Instruments, along with Marvell and others. When the first Google TV devices were released by Logitech and Sony, it was clear that they were far too expensive for the market; for example, while Apple was selling Apple TV for $99 (U.S.) and Roku's set-top boxes were priced at $99 or less, the Logitech Revue was launched at $399. In order for Sony and Logitech to be competitive, they had to drastically cut prices and, in Logitech's case, take huge losses. (Logitech subsequently abandoned Google TV.)

By switching from the Intel architecture to ARM, Google TV's licensees will gain a less-expensive, lower-power platform that can compete with set-top boxes from Apple, Roku and others on both price and performance. They'll also get a choice of multiple processor vendors; for example, even though Marvell is the lead partner, there's nothing keeping Samsung from using its own ARM-based processors in its HDTVs, Blu-Ray players and set-top boxes.

In short, this is the move that Google should have made from the beginning. With lower-priced set-top boxes, the ability to run apps and an operating system based on a more modern version of Android, Google TV 2.0 should be significantly more successful than the original version. At the very least, it has a chance for survival, instead of being "dead on arrival".

Intel surrenders in the set-top box war

NewTeeVee reports that Intel has shut down its its Digital Home Group, which was working on chips including Atom-based CE media processors for Internet-based set-top boxes, including Google TV and the Boxee Box. The Digital Home Group team has been reassigned to tablet development. Some work will continue on devices for cable and IPTV set-top boxes, such as the processor that Pace is using in the Xfinity set-top box that it developed for Comcast.

Intel was a partner in Google TV's development, and Intel's involvement was partially responsible for the failure of the first-generation product. The reason was that only Intel processors could be used in Google TV devices, and the cost of Intel's Atom processor made the price of products such as the Logitech Revue uncompetitive. The Revue was launched at $299, then dropped to $250 and now sells for $99. The price of Intel's processors wasn't the only problem, of course; poorly-designed software, inscrutable remote controls and a lack of support from content providers didn't help.

Now, processors based on ARM look like they have the upper hand in future Internet set-top box development. ARM-based processors are less expensive than Intel's Atom, and potential set-top box makers such as Samsung already manufacture them. Apple's A-series of processors is based on ARM. Now, it appears that both Google TV and Boxee will go with ARM for their next-generation products.

Google buys Motorola Mobility: More questions than answers?

This morning opened with a bang, when Google announced that it had made a friendly offer to acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. The offer caught a lot of people in the industry flat-footed (although not Ben Bajarin, who wrote an amazingly prescient post last week on why Google should buy Motorola Mobility.)

$12.5 billion is a 63% premium over the price that Motorola Mobility's stock closed at last Friday, so why would Google pay so much to purchase the company? The one thing that everyone agrees upon is that Google wanted Motorola's patents, a pool nearly four times larger than the one that the company bid on from Nortel. The question is how valuable those patents will be in protecting Google's Android licensees from patent challenges by Microsoft, Apple and others. Microsoft was suing Motorola Mobility for patent infringement before today's announcement, so the Motorola patent library might not provide all the protection that Google needs. In addition, acquiring Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion to get the patents prompts the question, in hindsight, whether Google would have been better off staying in the Nortel bidding and perhaps winning exclusive ownership of the patents for $5 or $6 billion. It also begs the question as to why Google didn't simply buy Motorola's patents, not the entire company; the consensus opinion is that Motorola's management refused to sell the patents by themselves.

Google got most of its top hardware partners to sign onto a press release endorsing the acquisition, but you have to wonder what the leaders of companies such as HTC, Samsung and LG Electronics are really thinking. In one move, Google went from being a supplier of perhaps their most critical smartphone technology to one of their biggest competitors. As Henry Blodget points out, hardware is a low-margin, semi-commodity business (for everyone except Apple). It's radically different from the software business, and the Motorola acquisition will increase Google's headcount by 60% overnight.

Google has declared that it will run Motorola Mobility as a separate business, and won't change the way that it runs its Android business. That's what Motorola's hardware partners (and possibly regulators) want to hear, but it creates a dilemma for Google. If the company wants to maximize the value of Motorola, it has to much more tightly integrate Android and Motorola, enabling Motorola to get new features and new versions of Android before other licensees. That, however, would violate its pledge to run the two businesses independently. The second option is to run Motorola so that it doesn't compete with other licensees, but that would cause the company to lose all its good developers, designers and hardware engineers. No one wants to work for a crippled company. The third option is that Google could sell off Motorola's hardware businesses, but to whom? The fate of Motorola's hardware businesses will be up in the air until the acquisition is completed, if not substantially after that.

In addition, despite some analysts' opinions that antitrust regulators won't stop the acquisition, there's substantial reason to doubt that the acquisition will occur without significant concessions by Google. There are so many antitrust investigations of Google underway, from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to U.S. State investigations, to European Union investigations, that this acquisition can't help but be looked at in the context of Google's overall behavior. At the very least, Google will have to make its "hands-off" approach to running Motorola Mobility a guarantee, and will have to agree to make Android and related products available to all licensees on an equal, non-discriminatory basis. Regulatory agencies may also use approval of this acquisition as a lever to get Google to agree to restrictions on how it runs its search engine, how it integrates its products, and how its services work on mobile platforms.

One final note: Most reports have noted only in passing that, in addition to mobile phones and patents, Google is also getting Motorola's set-top box business. In fact, depending on who's doing the measurement, Motorola is either the world's #1 or #2 vendor of set-top boxes. Historically, customers such as cable and IPTV operators have had enormous control over the design of the set-top boxes they buy, so Google can't arbitrarily add Google TV or the Google search engine to all of its devices. However, this acquisition gets Google's foot in the door with established multichannel video providers in a very big way. At the very least, we're likely to see the next generation of Motorola's set-top boxes and home gateways run Android, even if Google's customers hide the Android layer from end users.

Google's proposed acquisition of Motorola Mobility poses more questions than it answers. We may be waiting for the answers for quite some time.

Technology previews vs. premature release

Earlier today, Nintendo previewed its new Wii U at the E3 conference. The Wii U is a new console with a tablet-like device that serves as a controller and second display device. Like a number of other Nintendo events, today's Wii U announcement was deliberately positioned as a technology preview rather than a formal product announcement. The Wii U won't ship until 2012, and it may be significantly different by the time it ships. However, Nintendo is encouraging developers to start writing games and applications for the Wii U, so that when it ships, there will be a significant third-party library to support it.

I'm not a fan of early announcements, but when it comes to new platforms, technology previews make a lot of sense. They introduce developers, the press and potential customers to new product concepts, and they build interest and support for the formal product release. They buy time for their vendors--Nintendo said "2012", which gives them almost 18 months. They're clearly prototypes, and they give vendors the time they need to gather feedback and make changes before they go to market.

Compare this approach with what Google did with Google TV and its Android 3.0 tablets. Last year's Google TV announcement was clearly premature; the resulting products from Sony and Logitech were too expensive and too hard to use for most consumers. There was no reason for Google and its partners to rush Google TV out for last year's holiday season. Had they positioned the announcement at last year's I/O Conference as a technology preview, with a product release scheduled for some time in 2011, they would have had the opportunity to get developers involved, get much more usability feedback and resolve objections from television and cable networks before they went to market.

Much the same thing happened earlier this year with Android 3.0 and Motorola's Xoom. Google and Motorola were determined to beat Apple's iPad 2 to market, so they rushed out both Honeycomb (Android 3.0) and the Xoom. Third-party developers had almost no time to develop tablet-aware Android apps before the Xoom shipped, and the first version of the Xoom was much too expensive: $799 (U.S.) without a data plan, or $599 with a two-year contract. In addition, Motorola promoted the Xoom's LTE broadband compatibility, but the initial model shipped with 3G CDMA, and Motorola still hasn't released the LTE capability.

Honeycomb was rough around the edges, with almost no tablet-specific apps, and the Xoom was too expensive. It was a replay of the Google TV launch. Even though there are many more Android tablets coming this year, it looks like there won't be a big market for them until 2012 at the earliest.

If Google had given a technology preview of Google TV last year for release in 2011, and if they had previewed Honeycomb with "reference platform" tablets early this year for release in time for the holiday season, it would have given developers time to build a base of compatible apps, and hardware vendors time to build devices that took full advantage of the operating system while meeting customers' price expectations. In hindsight, it wouldn't have hurt Google and Motorola at all to ship after the iPad 2; in fact, they would have shipped better products at lower prices.

The lesson is that if you're working on platforms, not just products and services that are compatible with existing platforms, technology previews are a much better option than prematurely releasing final products.

D-Link "plays the field" with a Yahoo Connected TV set-top box

Last week, D-Link announced a deal with Yahoo to implement that company's Connected TV in a set-top box. The D-Link/Yahoo set-top box will sell for less than $200 (U.S.) and will ship in Q2 2011. This is in addition to the D-Link Boxee Box that was released in time for last year's holiday season.

One of the major features of the latest version of Yahoo's Connected TV is its ability to integrate and interact with content coming from broadcast and cable networks. For example, at CES, Yahoo demonstrated the ability to overlay polls on live content from CBS and Showtime. For that to work, the video from a user's cable, satellite or IPTV box will have to go through the D-Link/Yahoo box. It's the same approach that Google TV uses.

Rafe Needleman of Cnet suggests that the Yahoo box shouldn't be priced much more than $49, because it doesn't offer much in the way of new content. As for D-Link, it's clearly hedging its bets on who will be the set-top box winner, but it's also adding to consumer confusion: When a customer goes into, say, Best Buy, will they be able to figure out whether to go with the D-Link Boxee or Yahoo boxes? My suspicion is that this isn't the last Internet TV system that D-Link will support.

Internet TV will turn your next HDTV into a set-top box

Ryan Lawler of NewTeeVee has written an excellent post about how the just-concluded Consumer Electronics Show demonstrated that HDTV manufacturers have become the new consumer gatekeepers, and cable (as well as satellite and IPTV) operators are just another content option. This is thanks to the Internet TV functions built into almost all of the major-brand HDTVs introduced at the conference. Some manufacturers, such as Samsung, Vizio and Sony, have licensed Internet TV technology from Yahoo, Google and/or Boxee. Others, such as Panasonic, have developed their own Internet TV systems.

Lawler's argument is somewhat premature, in that only a small minority of installed HDTVs have Internet TV capabilities, and sales growth in the U.S. market has slowed to only 1% per year. Nevertheless, it points out a "blind spot" in many industry observers' thinking (including my own). The focus to date has been on set-top boxes from Apple, Boxee, Google, Roku, etc. The argument has been made that most consumers won't add another set-top box to the one they already have from their cable, satellite or IPTV provider.

Last year, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission proposed a new set-top box design called AllVid that would combine the functionality of service provider and over-the-top set-top boxes in a single device. However, Internet TVs don't require a separate set-top box for over-the-top Internet video, and as Lawler points out, consumers' incumbent multichannel video services show up as one of many content choices, including Netflix, Amazon on Demand, Twitter, Pandora and other services. These Internet TVs accomplish most of the goals of AllVid without requiring any changes to existing set-top boxes.

On the other hand, just as there's currently a lot of consumer confusion about how to choose among Apple TV, Boxee, Google TV, Roku, Vudu and other over-the-top set-top boxes, there will be confusion about the Internet TV services built into the new HDTVs. That's in addition to the existing confusion over HDTV resolutions, refresh rates, backlight technologies and 3D technologies/formats, all of which may be enough to stall consumer adoption. I don't think that there's a chance that we'll see any real standards, either de facto or imposed by the consumer electronics industry, to lessen the confusion. It will take several years for technologies and formats to shake out.

Sooner or later, however, most HDTVs will be Internet-enabled, and at that point, the third-party set-top box argument will be moot. The real challenge for the current set-top box vendors will be to get their systems integrated into HDTVs. Yahoo is in the lead today, but with strong competition from Google and Boxee, it's not likely to keep it over the long run.

Comcast's Xcalibur: Another race back to the past?

Light Reading has published an article about Comcast's new Xcalibur service, which is in an early test in Augusta, GA. The details of the service are still sketchy, but it appears to be a hybrid web-to-TV set-top box codenamed "Parker", possibly the one under development in Comcast's Seattle labs that I wrote about last year. According to Light Reading's sources, Xcalibur is a "managed over-the-top" video service that's designed to compete with offerings such as Apple TV, Boxee, Roku and Google TV while keeping subscribers inside the Comcast tent.

Xcalibur is said to offer a limited, hand-picked selection of websites and video services. It's yet another "walled garden" approach, and it's very likely that you won't find any content on Xcalibur that's competitive with any of Comcast's existing services.

It's true that the other over-the-top video services are also walled gardens to some extent, but with the exception of Apple TV, that's not because they're deliberately closed off. It requires some development work, but anyone can make their video content available on Boxee, Roku or Google TV. In the case of Boxee and Google TV, they want to offer even more web video content but are actively being blocked.

If you want to envision what Comcast could be doing, consider France's Free. Earlier today, Engadget wrote an article about a new over-the-top IPTV set-top box that's been launched by France's Free (Iliad) Internet service, the Freebox 6. Here's what the box has:

• 250GB hard drive
• Blu-Ray drive
• 802.11n WiFi adapter
• HDMI output
• 3D support
• Built-in DECT adapter for wireless telephones
• Web browser
• Motion-sensing remote
• Joystick
• Two powerline Ethernet adapters

Depending on whether you're a new or current Free customer and how long you've owned your previous Freebox, the cost will be between 60 and 120 Euros (approximately $80 to $160), and monthly triple-play service will be 29.99 Euros/month ($40.14). It offers all of Free's 154 basic video channels at that price, and 213 additional channels on higher tiers.

Comcast, and virtually every other U.S. multichannel video service provider, is driving to the future while staring in the rear-view mirror. A walled garden approach won't fly, but you wouldn't expect anything more from a company whose most exciting recent development is an app that turns an iPad into a remote control.

Roku to license its platform: The low-cost alternative to Google TV?

Engadget reports that Roku has begun licensing its hardware and software to consumer electronics companies. Its first licensee, Netgear, essentially repackaged the new Roku XD and is selling it at Best Buy, Radio Shack and Fry's. To date, Roku's market penetration has been limited by its distribution--prior to the Netgear deal, the only way to purchase a Roku set-top box was to buy it from Amazon or direct from Roku.

If you're a consumer electronics manufacturer, you can license the Google TV platform for free, but the hardware necessary to make it work is expensive: Consider that the least expensive Roku box sells for $59.99, while the Logitech Revue Google TV-compatible STB retails for $299.99. Even with a substantial licensing fee to Roku, consumer electronics manufacturers could add Roku capabilities to their HDTVs or Blu-Ray players for a fraction of the cost of the Google TV architecture. Shaving a few cents off the manufacturing cost of a product can make a big profit difference, and a Roku-based device has the potential to be much more profitable than one based on Google TV.

Even for manufacturers like Vizio who have developed their own Internet video capabilities, it may make sense to license the Roku platform and take advantage of its off-the-shelf ability to access Netflix, Amazon Video-on-Demand, Hulu Plus, Pandora, Major League Baseball, Vimeo, Sirius XM and many other content providers. Negotiating deals with content providers takes time and money, and licensing the Roku platform would allow these manufacturers to focus on manufacturing and marketing, not content acquisition.

Could Roku end up in as many devices as Netflix currently does? It's a real possibility.

Apple TV vs. Google TV: A clear choice for consumers

Now that Apple TVs are showing up in stores (and are being snapped up by customers), and Logitech has set a ship date and price for its Google TV set-top box, consumers will have a clear choice between the companies' fundamentally different approaches to user interaction.

Apple TV takes over the living room screen while you're looking for content, but once you press "play", it gets out of the way, and you watch television as you always have. However, it doesn't interact in any way with your existing cable, satellite or IPTV set-top box, and your existing video signal doesn't pass through the Apple TV box.

Google TV, on the other hand, turns television into a content source for the Internet, and turns your big-screen television into an oversized Internet browser. Your existing video signal passes through the Google TV box. It overlays a search bar and search results on live television. It puts web pages on the television screen, with the live television image as a small "picture-in-picture" overlay.  If you're a Dish Network subscriber, Google TV takes over the electronic program guide functions as well.

The fundamental question for consumers is: Do you want to browse the Internet on your living room television? If you do, Google TV is the way to go. Or, do you want to watch television on your television and simultaneously browse the Internet through a tablet or laptop? If so, Apple TV should be your choice. The "wild card" in all this is the fact that Apple TV runs iOS and could run third-party apps in the future. This would dramatically increase the functionality of Apple TV, although it would still be a separate content source, not a television pass-through device.

Many people believe that Apple's long-term game plan is to make much of the content that's currently available through cable, satellite and IPTV set-top boxes available through Apple TV, thus competing directly with the existing service providers. If that happens, Google TV's ability to pass through video from existing set-top boxes would no longer be an advantage.

As a practical matter, I think that the price difference between Apple TV and Google TV, and Apple TV's inherent ease of use, will be the most important factors driving sales for the holiday shopping season. Apple TV is $99 complete, while Logitech's Revue running Google TV will be $299.99 (Dish Network subscribers can buy it for $179). The Revue comes with an ugly QWERTY keyboard as its remote control; a slightly more elegant optional remote control can be purchased for $129.00, and an HD video camera for webcasting and videoconferencing will cost $149.99. (Sony's new remote control for its Google TV implementation looks like it was designed by the same team that did the Pontiac Aztek.)

My suspicion is that in-store demos of Google TV are going to go "off the rails" as soon as people pick up the keyboard and try to use the TV as a web browser. Apple TV is point-and-click simple, but when consumers realize that they have to type in order to use Google TV, interest is going to drop very quickly. I could be wrong, but I think that Apple TV will win the battle, at least this holiday season.

Logitech's Google TV set-top-box price and availability date announced

According to Engadget, Logitech has announced that its Google TV set-top box, the Revue, will be priced at $299 in the U.S. and will ship on September 29th. Dish Network subscribers can purchase a single Revue at a discounted price of $179. My suspicion is that Logitech is going to have a very tough time of it this holiday season.

The Revue was clearly designed to be competitive with the last-generation Apple TV, but the new version, which will be shipping at about the same time, will be priced at $99. Roku's current-generation set-top boxes run from $59.99 to $99.99, although they have new-generation models in the pipeline that may be more expensive. Boxee's Boxee Box by D-Link has a $229.99 list price, but Amazon has it available for pre-order at $199.99.

Looking at the Logitech Revue's price, I don't see how it competes in the current environment. By basing its architecture on Intel, Google automatically made its partners vulnerable to price competition from companies using ARM processors, and that's exactly what's happening. If the price point for a viable add-on set-top box drops to $199 or less (and especially if it drops to $99), I don't see how Google TV set-top boxes will be able to compete without subsidies.

ARM to support Google TV, but will Intel let them?

According to Engadget, the president of ARM, Tudor Brown, said that ARM support for Google TV is "in the works, and now that they support Flash and Google Chrome, they plan to "optimize" for Google TV on Android. If it happens, it'll be a big boost for the Google TV platform, which to date only supports Intel's Atom platform. Atom is expensive and power-hungry relative to ARM's processors, and the availability of ARM processors will make Google TV much more practical and cost-effective to implement.

There's a question, however, as to whether Intel has veto power over other processor vendors joining the Google TV initiative. The way that the Google TV project has been run makes it look like Intel is actually calling the shots rather than Google. Consider that Google TV is being released on a down-rev version of Android without any support for WebM. If Google was running the show, you'd think that it would want to showcase WebM and use the most advanced version of Android, but that's not what happening.

ARM may be waiting until Google open sources the Google TV platform, which Google said would happen next summer. By that time, however, Intel could change some portion of the platform to make it work better on Intel's architecture, or not work at all on any architecture other than Intel's. So, just as Adobe kept saying that support for Flash on the iPhone was "coming real soon" until it was obvious that it wasn't, I'll believe that ARM is participating in Google TV when I see representatives from ARM, Intel and Google sitting side-by-side at a Google TV press conference.

Google TV: Right hand, meet left hand

When Google announced Google TV at last week's I/O Conference, one of the jaw-dropping omissions was that there was no mention whatsoever of support for WebM or the VP8 codec, which Google had announced with a great deal of industry support the day before. YouTube, the world's largest online video site, owned by Google, announced that it would make all its videos available in WebM going forward. At the Google TV announcement, however, YouTube's participation was limited to a strange "we pick the content for you" service that seemed to have no connection to Google TV whatsoever. Yesterday, an Intel executive said that the company might support WebM in the future, "if VP8 establishes itself in the Smart TV space," whatever that means. And, as if that isn't enough, Google TV will be based on Android 2.1, even though the company launched Android 2.2 to great fanfare minutes before the Google TV announcement.

When companies get big, groups stop talking to each other and bureaucracy takes hold. It's clear that the WebM and Google TV teams didn't talk to each other, or if they did, there was no adult supervision applied to insure that they worked together. It also looks like the Google TV and Android teams didn't talk very much, either. If WebM is such an important initiative, why isn't it in Google TV? From Intel's perspective, it may never be in Google TV. Why on Earth is Google planning to release Google TV with an old version of Android? Why did YouTube look like a "bit player" in the Google TV announcement?

Looking from the outside, this suggests that there are some serious management problems at Google. The WebM product group and YouTube are working closely together, but Google TV is completely out of sync with both WebM and Android, and Google TV is barely talking to YouTube. They're all in the web video business, but they're working at cross purposes. Intel won't adopt WebM unless "VP8 establishes itself in the Smart TV space"? "Smart TV" is what the whole Google TV initiative is about. How can VP8 establish itself if it's not included?

New Apple TV in the works, based on iPhone OS and priced at $99?

Engadget reported today that Apple is working on a next-generation Apple TV that will be based on iPhone OS, will be built for streaming (either from the cloud or an in-home Time Capsule), and will support 1080P HD output. But, the biggest news (if it's true) is that Apple plans to sell its next-generation device for $99. That's virtually an impulse buy, and they're likely to fly out of Apple's stores.

There's no word on whether this device will be compatible with off-the-shelf iPhone apps, and it's very unlikely that it will be announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference on June 7th, but my guess is that (again, if any of this is true) Apple plans to have this out in time for the 2010 Christmas Season, thus thorougly bolloxing up the launch of Google TV. Why? Given the fact that Google TV is based on Intel's Atom architecture, it's very unlikely that Logitech's standalone set-top box is going to come to market for less than $200, and it'll probably be closer to $300.

The big issue for Apple TV is whether Apple will allow access to any web video service, as Google is striving to do, or whether it will be locked down to the iTunes Store, as the current iteration of Apple TV is. If the new Apple TV is still locked down, Google TV will provide a competitive alternative, although not an attractive alternative given its (probable) price.

Google TV: Not ready for prime time?

As I write this, the self-congratulatory interviewing of Google's launch partners for Google TV is still going on at the I/O Conference, but the important details of Google TV are now public. First, the details that have leaked over the last month or so are generally true:

• Google TV will be based on Android (Version 2.1, not 2.2, even though the first products won't ship until this fall) and Chrome.
  
• Google has been working with Dish Network for some time, and Google TV will be integrated with Dish's DVRs.
  
• Google's hardware partners are Intel (providing Atom CPUs and chip sets), Sony (providing Internet-enabled HDTVs and a Google TV-compatible Blu-Ray player) and Logitech (with a forthcoming set-top box).
  
• The first distribution partner will be Best Buy.
  
• Amazon and Netflix have agreed to make their sites and content available to Google TV (no big deal, because both companies have policies of making their video content available virtually everywhere).

Some of the details of Google TV:

• It brings the Google search engine to TV, where users can search for content, either from their video service provider (cable, satellite or IPTV) or on the web, using a "Quick Search" bar like Chrome.
  
• It has its own "home page" that can be used for keeping track of favorite series and applications.
  
• It supports (and relies heavily upon) Flash Video for displaying web video.
  
• Google TV-enabled devices will connect to conventional set-top boxes via HDMI and IR Blaster remote controls, which is what allows Google TV devices to display both web and service provider video content.
  
• If conventional set-top box vendors implement Google's control protocol, Google TV devices can serve as their Interactive Program Guides, request future shows to be recorded on their DVRs, and perform other functions.
  
• Google TV can create a home page for a television series "on the fly", linking to available episodes from cable, satellite and IPTV providers, as well as on-demand episodes available on the web from various sources.
  
• Live video can be overlayed on web content in a small picture-in-picture window; this is useful for viewing sports game stats while watching a game in real time, or for doing IMDB lookups while watching a television show or movie.
  
• Since the key user interface for Google TV is Chrome, users can search for and access music, images and other content along with video.
  
• Android applications that don't require smartphone functionality will work on Google TV; applications can also be written to take advantage of Google TV's APIs (one application demonstrated could take closed captions and translate them from English to another language for non-English speaking viewers.)

Those are the positive bullet points. Here's why I think that Google "pulled the trigger" on Google TV too soon:

• Google's partners plan to start shipping and selling compatible hardware this Fall in time for the 2010 Christmas season, but the Android Marketplace, Google TV SDKs and Web APIs needed to develop new applications, integrate other devices with Google TVs and take full advantage of the web platform won't be released until early 2011. The entire platform should be available as open source in Summer 2011. In short, that means that the only source for optimized content and applications for at least six months will be Google, Sony, Logitech and a handful of chosen partners who get early access to the platform. 
• Google has published a list of recommendations for how web video providers can customize their content for Google TV. Much of it is common sense, but when it comes to formats and codecs, Google recommends Flash Video using H.264 1080i. There's no mention of WebM in the recommendations, and it wasn't mentioned anywhere in the Google TV announcement. It sounds like the Google TV and WebM teams haven't been talking to each other.
  
• The standard video I/O for Google TV-enabled devices will be HDMI. If your HDTV is an older model without HDMI, or your set-top box uses component video rather than HDMI, you're out of luck.
  
• Much of Google TV's ability to interact with service providers' set-top boxes depends on those vendors' (and their service provider customers') support of Google's IP control protocol. Today, only Dish Networks/Echostar supports the protocol. Unless Google TV becomes wildly popular, Dish's competitors aren't going to adopt Google's technology.
  
• Most of the power of Google TV requires a full keyboard for doing searches. In fact, they never even demonstrated an on-screen keyboard. It's anyone's guess as to how eagerly consumers will adopt using a full keyboard rather than a conventional television remote.
  
• One of the things that was so impressive about the WebM announcement yesterday was the breadth of industry support for the format--hardware, software and services. Google has been unable to get anyone else beyond the hardware partners first rumored months ago to sign onto Google TV. Whether that's due to the cost of Intel's hardware platform, Sony's "my way or the highway" approach to collaboration with partners, or other factors, is still a matter of speculation, but it's been widely reported that both Samsung and Panasonic were approached to join the consortium and refused.
  
• Google TV will still be subject to the policies of web video providers. Google referenced and showed a number of Fox television shows; they even showed a home page for the series "House" that included icons for getting old episodes from Hulu. Yet, they studiously avoided going to the Hulu website, instead retrieving the episodes from Amazon. Hulu prohibits viewing its content on television sets and goes out of its way to block systems like Google TV that try to do so. It's likely that the cable operators will also block their sites from Google TV.

Google demonstrated a lot of nice capabilities, and I certainly don't want to take anything away from that. A lot of thought has gone into Google TV. However, I think that they would have been better off to have called this a technology preview, rather than try to rush product into the market for Christmas 2010. By waiting, they would have had more time to sign up hardware partners, to bring additional CPU and chipset vendors on board with lower-cost and lower-power platforms, and to enable Google's developer partners to go to market with applications and content at the same time that the platform first reaches customers' homes. And, they could have baked WebM into the architecture as an essential component.

My feeling is that this could turn out much like Google Wave: By the time it actually gets released for general consumption and is fully usable, most people will have lost interest.