Google TV plan is causing jitters in Hollywood
Many worry that Silicon Valley will upend the entertainment industry just like the Internet ravaged the music and newspaper industries. — The two men leading Google TV believe technological innovation can make TV better and more profitable for everyone.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's television ambitions have been building since March, when Google and its hardware partners laid out plans for a television foothold — bringing the Chrome browser and Android to the living-room screen via set-top boxes and TVs from Sony, Intel and Logitech. What was pitched as a technical platform play is now being read in Los Angeles as an invasion.
The Los Angeles Times frames the mood among studio and network executives as dread: the memory of what the Internet did to music labels and newspapers is fresh enough that many in Hollywood assume a Silicon Valley entrant means disintermediation, not partnership. The two executives leading Google TV are pushing the opposite framing — that innovation makes television better and more profitable for everyone — setting up a standoff over who controls distribution and monetization.
First-order effects
- Content owners face an immediate gating decision: whether to let Google TV devices access their full web video libraries or restrict them, since the browser-based approach puts the choice of what plays on the box partly outside Google's hands.
Second-order effects
- Sony, Logitech and other hardware partners must sell living-room devices whose appeal depends on content that Hollywood may withhold, forcing them to lobby studios or ship products with thinner catalogs than promised.
Third-order effects
- If the music and newspaper precedent holds, broadcast and cable economics get restructured around open-web delivery, where search and advertising intermediaries — not channel lineups — decide what audiences find; whether that ends in licensing deals like the ones that stabilized digital music, or in prolonged blockade like early newspaper paywalls, is the unresolved question.
The trend: Silicon Valley platforms are pushing into the living room, forcing legacy content industries to choose between accommodation and blockade before the new distribution layer hardens.