GoogleTV is Google's entry into the living room. Let's see if google can dethrone apple from another area that they have..... wait a second, An area of media where apple doesn't have the upper hand already? This could get real interesting.
I am personally an apple fan. I also love technology. I think The fact that I love apple products so much is because that company seems to put more care into what they manufacture than any other company in the market. Everything is polished, and clean. The industry even holds each apple product as a comparison to what all other products strive to be like in their chosen field. For the last 12 years apple has been the leader for innovation in pretty much every division of technology that it touches.
However when apple released the AppleTV in 2007, it was being sold as a product to connect your living room to the large digital library people had been massing since the release of the iTunes store. The product didn't do so well for a lot of reasons. Mainly because it was not really all that compelling at it's price point. Plus iTunes didn't have any HD content to stream to a device that also could not display 1080P. So the device was immediately labeled as a "hobby". And apple has referred to it as such ever since. The device received an upgrade a little later boosting it's video output resolution and a view more things hardware and software wise, but the product remained mostly the same dull box.
With google releasing this new platform for their GoogleTV apple seriously needs to take those old AppleTV ideas out of storage and start realizing that in order gain control over the living room like they had hoped to do originally, they will need to seriously step their game up. The GTV platform is cool in a lot of ways. It puts the box after the cable box and by doing that allows for the device to aggregate all content available on cable and the Internet to make it all searchable and viewable. Also the fact that they are taking the extra step with it and putting it into new tv sets themselves is really cool for everyone.
I have an ATV right now in the living room. Personally I love what I can do with the device. Granted it is useless unless the owner either is loaded and can afford to purchase everything they want to watch or they steal all their content. I will not divulge which of those describes my situation. One thing they could add to the ATV would be an app store of some kind. What would be cool about this is they already have thousands of developers making thousands of apps for the iPhone and iPad. So if they opened up an app store for the ATV, I can guarantee it would be an over night success just like all of the other platforms they have. I can also see apple having some kind of video subscription service, allowing ATV owners to subscribe much like cable and be able to view all content in the store. Would be interesting, however I can just image the cow the networks would have over the slightest inclination to that idea. Plus they probably would force adds into the videos as well.
In closing since WWDC is only a week or so away, it will be very interesting to see what apple comes up with. I just really hope they update the ATV to compete with the GTV because if they do not then they are basically conceding victory over the living room to google and their new platform.
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