Google TV will fail
Yesterday Google announced Google TV on their yearly Google I/O event. Google TV will try to achieve what many companies have tried before: Combine the Web with the TV. The utopian vision is neatly explained in this two minute youtube video. My guess is that this concept will fail. No matter how much I love Google and how often I use their products, I bet this will be a venture they will soon try to forget. Let me explain why:
- TV is a passive medium. The great thing about TV is that you can sit down and zap. No interaction needed! Trying to make it an active medium with tons of things to do will confuse the user.
- Google TV offers you freedom of choice. You can now choose between millions of clips, video’s, shows, movies, etc. But this freedom of choice will only cripple the user. It is very hard to choose because it might just be possible you make the wrong decision. You only have a limited time each day to watch TV so what should you watch? Old passive TV is very simple. Don’t like what you see? ZAP! Also, you can easily get an overview of all the content showing that evening so you can make a decision on what to watch and what to miss.
- Sometimes I already try to browse on my TV. But it’s just a painful experience. The resolution is too low so it’s hard to read anything. Also to have a good browsing experience you need a keyboard and a mouse. So if Google TV hasn’t got a good solution for this problem the whole browsing ability of Google TV will be pretty useless.
- Beneath my TV are three boxes (Set-top, receiver, DVD player) already. I don’t want to add another box! And I certainly don’t want to buy a new TV with integrated Google TV. I just bought a new one two years ago. The fact that you have to use extra hardware for Google TV will be another obstacle a lot of users just don’t want to take.
Of course, it’s easy to just be critical and shoot. So I want to share an idea on how Google TV might become a success:
- You have to be able to socialize with your friends via Google TV. As I said the freedom of choice will be a problem, so there needs to be a good recommendation system. ‘If you liked this than you will probably also like this…’. Knowing Google this will probably be available in Google TV. But they need to take it further. It would be great if you have the ability to recommend content to your friends and visa versa. Or to watch a show simultaneously with ‘virtual’ friends and communicate about the show. This way watching TV will become a whole new experience and we might accept that TV is becoming less passive and more active.
What do you think, am I wrong or right? Let me know in the comments!
