Google Looks at Making Mobile TV for ‘Android’ Platform

Google CEO Eric Schmidt told PBS’ Charlie Rose that the search juggernaut is looking at applying its mobile phone OS Android to enabling phones to act as mobile TVs. Noting that within years, up to 5.5 billion people may be using mobile phones, Schmidt told Rose that the technology now empowers people the world over with access to huge amounts of information, and that TV functionality will add transparency to the positive outcomes of this development.

Schmidt says we need to “learn as a society what it means to be interconnected all the time” and is quoted in a Tech Crunch transcript as saying the following:

In our lifetimes we’re going from almost no one being able to communicate to almost everyone be able to communicate. We’re also going from almost no one having any kind of information and access to libraries to virtually everyone having access to every piece of information in the world. That is a enormous accomplishment to humanity.

Indeed, bringing the knowledge that has accumulated over the course of all human history, to billions of people, in remote corners of the world, via hand-held browsing devices, is an astonishing advance. Allowing those devices to also show full-quality TV, with news, documentaries and raw video, means providing the average person with more visual access to the world than ever before.

It also means there is potential for instant-upload of new footage from anywhere, viewable anywhere. This is where Android TV could help provide a massive increase in transparency across politics and media. Politicians, whether in local US elections or national bids for foreign government positions, would be visible in multiple instances to any audience. Viewers could compare and contrast past speeches with current ones, raising the bar for clarity and integrity.

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There is room for digital manipulation, of course, which would interfere with that transparency, but new web phenomena like Wikipedia, now an established information source, have demonstrated that manipulations can be caught and corrected and that the open web really is more transparent and better at preventing manipulation of information than mass media institutions organized around a pyramid-shaped hierarchy.

Does this mean that Google’s new motto is “power to the people” or that the tech firm is going in the direction of seeking to get its fingers into every media sphere the world over? No and no, not exactly. It’s more a case of wanting to make sure that what people want to do with web media they can do best through Google and its software and services.

Online TV, says Schmidt, is part of the logical evolution of mobile devices, and highly personalized programming, which the user can shape or the service can offer, allows for more consumer-oriented advertising, which means potentially a higher return for ad-buyers and so a better revenue stream for Google. Smart online TV is already evolving, and Google, which owns YouTube and Google Video, as well as Google News, wants to be part of that evolution.

Schmidt noted that there is a fundamental social value to the proliferation of mobile-phone-based photography and video recording and even moreso when it can be uploaded to the web. According to Schmidt:

The important thing here is that the phenomenon of user generated content of which YouTube is an example is I think the defining expression of humanity over the next 10 to 20 years. We had no idea that all these things were going on because there was no way to see them. And now if you have someone who is being taken advantage of or abused or put into an inappropriate position, what have you, they can take a picture. They can record what the police are doing [to prevent abuses of power in places where that might be a problem].

Already, Schmidt says, they are working on new more sophisticated ads that can appear with Google searches that use video instead of text and are more “immersive”. This is a tricky area, where the potential for turning off end-users must be considered, but online TV platforms already use video ads to interrupt programming far less than with traditional TV, making that sort of ad less offensive than when interactive flash ads take over an online newspaper.

“Our primary focus is on end-users and their needs”, said Schmidt. The approach means that Google uses its ability to deliver information or services to end-users, via unequaled visibility, in a way that maximizes value for end-users and thus ad-distribution potential for Google. Schmidt said the company’s strategy can be described now as “search, ads and aps”.