Google TV coming to a home theater near you
By TJ Kirchner
Google recently revealed a new feature that enables you to play YouTube videos, Picasa albums, and multimedia content from your computer on any device with Universal Plug-and-Play. No hardware installation is necessary. Simply add the Google Media Server gadget to your Google Desktop and you’re ready to go.
Google has already made deals with makers of television, Blu-Ray players, and other devices, including HP, Apple, and others. NYTimes writer Saul Hansell brought up a good point when he said the following:
If Hulu continues to build audience and content with its high-end programming approach, it will find it easy to cut deals to link to devices.
This should make the Playstation 3 fan boys happy, since the device already is UPnP enabled. Futhermore, the Google Media Server team tried to extend the same functionality to the Xbox 360. However, they had to scrap the idea when they ran into some technical and legal issues.
The only way to connect the Xbox 360 to a UPnP server, was to have a service that is only found on Microsoft services (used for registering for DRM content) and for the server itself to be claimed to be made by Microsoft. Legal would not allow us to pretend to be Microsoft (although there are other servers out there that do).
Unfortunately, there are still a lot of problems with the new system. A quick look into Google Media Server user forum is enough to tell you that the system still has plenty of glitches.
Plus, there’s the whole security issue with UPnP. Hopefully Google will address these issues and improve upon the standard or create some overlapping technology to make up for its shortcomings.
The online advertiser has wanted to become a big player in video advertising for a long time. With this new technology, they can bring YouTube, the largest online video site, straight to the customer’s television set. That’s especially attractive to marketers who may want their Google Ads extended to these devices.
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