The revolution will be televised

While many peo­ple have turned their atten­tion from the PC to mobile, it seems the bleed­ing edge of tech­nol­ogy is now mov­ing to television.

This week’s announce­ments of pric­ing around the Google TV offer­ings, com­bined with some of the first deliv­er­ies of AppleTV boxes, have kicked off a new salvo in the war for the third screen.

TV and web pre-history

Before I go into more details as to why I think this is impor­tant, I need to give newer read­ers some back­ground in the his­tory of the many failed attempts to merge the web and television.

In the early 1990s, in an era that is con­sid­ered mostly pre-internet (that is, before the inter­net became main­stream), then vice-presidential can­di­date Al Gore talked about the “infor­ma­tion super­high­way,” a con­cept that high­lighted a uni­verse where most inter­ac­tive data would move to your tele­vi­sion. The TV screen has always been the main screen in Amer­i­can house­hold and, unless you were a com­puter geek, that was largely the case in the early 1990s.

As the 1990s moved on and the com­mer­cial inter­net moved to the cen­ter of pub­lic con­scious­ness, there were sev­eral attempts to marry the inter­net and the web (12 years ago, I was even involved in a failed effort at cre­at­ing a stan­dard web model for bring­ing TV to the web). The basic idea, at the time, was to bring TV con­tent to the web and enhance it with some extra juicy bits from the web. This meant, for exam­ple, being able to push web con­tent that would pro­vide more info on a broad­cast (for exam­ple, related news sto­ries). The con­cept wasn’t new in that it had been embed­ded in a lot of British tele­vi­sion since the 1970s as tele­text, pass­ing extra con­tent as part of a broadcast.

Set top boxes wars

At the time, a group of engi­neers and prod­uct man­agers who had worked for Apple left the com­pany and started a new offer­ing called WebTV. WebTV was a new type of set-top box allow­ing its users to surf the web on their tele­vi­sion. The com­pany also intro­duced a set of spe­cial­ized tags that web devel­op­ers could use to cre­ate pages that were for­mat­ted to fit this new TV paradigm.

Oth­ers looked to the same con­cepts and, in the late 1990s, the set-top boxes became a new com­pet­i­tive arena for dis­trib­ut­ing con­tent in a dig­i­tal form (In order to dis­close my biases, I must point out that I worked on a con­sult­ing basis for Nokia’s set-top boxes group, an effort that ended up hav­ing an impact on some of the think­ing behind podcasting)

WebTV net­works was acquired by Microsoft and much of its tech­nol­ogy ended up in the Media Cen­ter edi­tion of Win­dows, which pow­ered the next wave of TV/web marriage.

Start­ing with Win­dows XP, Microsoft offered a Media Cen­ter edi­tion of their Win­dows plat­form. The idea was basi­cally Win­dows, on your TV. Unfor­tu­nately, the assump­tion that the PC expe­ri­ence could trans­late to a large screen proved to be mostly wrong (this, by the way, is a mis­take that Microsoft also made on mobile devices, assum­ing, until recently, that the win­dows metaphor could trans­port itself to other experiences).

As the dot­com boom led to a dot­com crash, much of the inten­tions to merge the web and TV dis­ap­peared. The con­cept of con­verged con­tent moved from the web to gam­ing sta­tions as a deliv­ery mech­a­nism  (in fact, around 2006–2007, I was con­sid­er­ing the Sony Playsta­tion as an attempt to get Blu­Ray to defeat HD-DVD instead of an actual deliv­ery device). In the midst of a 3-way war between Sony, Microsoft, and Nin­tendo for gam­ing supremacy, Appled announce its first foray into the TV space with iTV (later to be renamed AppleTV). While they didn’t look at games as a space at the time, their model of attach­ing a device to the TV was no dif­fer­ent then than the model they have today: the set-top box as a way to buy con­tent from Apple. In that sense, the fact that the com­pany hasn’t changed direc­tion points to their belief that this is the right model (though I per­son­ally think that, in the long run, they will end up open­ing the mar­ket­place fur­ther, in a fash­ion sim­i­lar to what they did with the iPhone).

Inter­net Every­where: 5, 15, 50

Over the last few years, as more video con­tent has become avail­able, the inter­net has moved back to being dis­cussed as a deliv­ery mech­a­nism for many types of devices.

I call that the 5, 15, 50 par­a­digm, since inter­net con­tent is now being offered on devices that have 5 inches screens (mobile devices), 15 inches screens (com­put­ers), and 50 inches screens (televisions).

Net­flix has had pretty good suc­cess with their strat­egy of get­ting their player inte­grated in a lot of devices, thus allow­ing their con­tent to be streamed pretty much every­where if a con­nec­tion is available.

Apple vs. Google

But now that the war is mov­ing to that new ground, two play­ers in the com­puter and mobile space have decided to fight for that cor­ner of our dig­i­tal lives: Apple is re-tuning its AppleTV box to be more com­pet­i­tive on a price level and Google is gear­ing up for a larger attack on the liv­ing room. In this case, how­ever, I think that Apple has an early lead with some crit­i­cal flaws.

The rea­son I believe Apple has an advan­tage here is that their offer­ing, from a prod­uct stand­point seems to bal­ance the right fea­ture vs. price com­pro­mise. The Net­flix and YouTube offer­ings are no-brainers but the reliance on iTunes as the deliv­ery mech­a­nism for your pic­tures and movies is annoy­ing: I think that’s a crit­i­cal flaw in that most peo­ple do not want to have to turn their com­puter and iTunes on in order to have access to that con­tent. Apple should offer a way to attach a net­work drive (maybe a mod­i­fied ver­sion of their time cap­sule) on which a user could drop pic­tures and movies, leav­ing them there for use from the Apple TV (or mac, iPhone, and iPod) at any time.

Google, on the other hand, is intro­duc­ing a prod­uct that is just a more mod­ern ver­sion of WebTV. And I’d war­rant that, at this time, the key­board inter­face approach is the wrong metaphor for the big screen. The key­board on the first devices (Log­itech Revue and Sony Inter­net TV) to fol­low the Google strat­egy are just too big (as the owner of a Log­itech DiNovo Mini, the key­board that’s mod­i­fied for logitech’s enhanced offer­ing, I can tell you that most nor­mal peo­ple get con­fused by such an offer­ing). This, in itself, would not be a killer as Boxee has demon­strated, with the remote for their boxee box, that a remote can have two sides, allow­ing for the com­plex­ity to be simplified.

Key­board aside, how­ever, GoogleTV will have a prob­lem the price point ($299 for the Revue), which is too high for most con­sumer. Con­sid­er­ing that Apple is pric­ing the AppleTV at $99, con­sumers may ques­tion what they get for the extra $200. Geeks like myself may end up buy­ing some­thing like the GoogleTV box but I sus­pect that the vast major­ity of the pub­lic will not.

Mean­while, the incum­bents in that space (cable com­pa­nies, as well as Microsoft, Sony, and Nin­tendo) are not sit­ting on their hands and smaller play­ers (Roku, Boxee) are look­ing to get a share of the mar­ket too.

The next set of bat­tles will be waged for your liv­ing room and they are gear­ing up to be inter­est­ing as, for the first time in a very long time, TV may become more about the con­sumer than it is about the advertisers.