Computed·Blg

Via TechSpot

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During his keynote speech at the annual Edinburgh Television Festival last Friday, Google Executive Eric Schmidt announced plans to launch Google's TV service in Europe starting early next year.

The original launch in the United States back in October 2010 received rather poor reviews, with questions being raised regarding lack of content being available. This has seen prices slashed on Logitech set-top boxes down as low as $99 in July, with similarly poor sales of the integrated Sony Bravia Google TV models.

How much of a success Google TV will become in Europe remains to be seen, with the UK broadcasters especially concerned about the damage it could do to their existing business models. Strong competition from established companies like Sky and Virgin Media could further complicate matters for the Internet search giant.

During the MacTaggart lecture, Schmidt sought to calm the fears of the broadcasting elite, taking full advantage of the fact he was the first non-TV executive to ever be invited to present the prestigious keynote lecture at the festival.

"We seek to support the content industry by providing an open platform for the next generation of TV to evolve, the same way Android is an open platform for the next generation of mobile” said Schmidt. “Some in the US feared we aimed to compete with broadcasters or content creators. Actually our intent is the opposite…".

Much like in the United States, Google faces a long battle to convince broadcasters and major media players of its intent to help evolve TV platforms with open technologies, rather than topple them.

Google seems to have firmly set its sights on a slice of the estimated $190bn TV advertising market which will do little to calm fears, especially when you consider Google's online advertising figures for 2010 were just $28.9bn in comparison.

Via ars technica

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At the Google I/O conference earlier this year, Google revealed that the Android Market would come to the Google TV set-top platform. Some evidence of the Honeycomb-based Google TV refresh surfaced in June when screenshots from developer hardware were leaked. Google TV development is now being opened to a broader audience.

In a post on the official Google TV blog, the search giant has announced the availability of a Google TV add-on for the Android SDK. The add-on is an early preview that will give third-party developers an opportunity to start porting their applications to Google TV.

The SDK add-on will currently only work on Linux desktop systems because it relies on Linux's native KVM virtualization system to provide a Google TV emulator. Google says that other environments will be supported in the future. Unlike the conventional phone and tablet versions of Android, which are largely designed to run on ARM devices, the Google TV reference hardware uses x86 hardware. The architecture difference might account for the lack of support in Android's traditional emulator.

We are planning to put the SDK add-on to the test later this week so we can report some hands-on findings. We suspect that the KVM-based emulator will offer better performance than the conventional Honeycomb emulator that Google's SDK currently provides for tablet development.

In addition to the SDK add-on, Google has also published a detailed user interface design guideline document that offers insight into best practices for building a 10-foot interface that will work will on Google TV hardware. The document addresses a wide range of issues, including D-pad navigation and television color variance.

The first iteration of Google TV flopped in the market and didn't see much consumer adoption. Introducing support for third-party applications could make Google TV significantly more compelling to consumers. The ability to trivially run applications like Plex could make Google TV a lot more useful. It's also worth noting that Android's recently added support for game controllers and other similar input devices could make Google TV hardware serve as a casual gaming console.