Comment Re:What is the point of Google TV? (Score 1) 107
The point is to unify the TV/DVD/blu-ray firmware ecosystem.
Google doesn't want to sell you a box. Although GoogleTV is available to Logitech and Roku and others to make boxes the real long term goal is to get GoogleTV to run *on the TVs themselves*. (And on DVD and blu-ray players.)
Right now each tv manufacturer writes its own firmware. My parents recently got an LG tv & home theater system which runs it's own special LG firmware which has it's own special UI and connects to it's own special LG app store. If you got a Samsung system it would have it's own Samsung firmware with a slightly different UI and a totally different app store. Similarly with Panasonic and Sony (Sony already sells a GoogleTV tv but most of their tvs run special Sony firmware) and so on. Even worse if you have a TV from one manufacturer and a blu-ray player from another. Then you have two different types of firmware with two different ui's and two different app stores.
With the market divided like that people have to learn different ways to control different tvs. Sure, technical people can switch between it fine, but it does confuse some such as my elderly parents. A unified system would be better. But even more relevantly with 50 different app stores an app developer needs to write 50 different versions of their tv app to get on all tvs. Or more likely they'll just give up and go develop cellphone apps for iOS or Android instead.
And speaking of cellphones, this is roughly where the cellphone market was 5 or so years ago. Before Android (and now WP7) offered a third-party alternative that almost all manufacturers could [eventually] agree upon using. This made life easier for end users and for app developers and eventually even the hardware manufacturers themselves. Google, as an 'app developer' wants to do the same thing to the tv market. Plus extra bonuses for them if they get a Google OS of some sort adopted as that standard because then searches go to Google, so Google gets to push out more ads. But even without that latter bonus just having a unified platform to target for development really benefits Google - and everyone else at the same time as well.