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Could Google TV Change the Face of the Living Room TV?

Since the dawn of home video, home entertainment has been all about giving the consumer maximum control of their living room TV.  With yesterday’s announcement that Google  along with Sony, Intel, Logitech, and Best Buy will be using the dominant search box and Android app-drive strategy to break down the walls between Web television, broadcast and cable, the living room TV is in for yet another facelift, which will undoubtedly continue to shuffle the way entertainment is consumed by millions of consumers.

“The web has had very little adoption on the premier entertainment device in your living room—your TV,” said Google’s Rishi Chandra. “(Web) video should be consumed on the biggest screen in your house.”

Then again Google TV could be just another addition to a long list of companies that have already tried this hat-trick and failed: WebTV, Intel Viiv, Wird World, AppleTV, Digeo, to name just a few.  Despite Google’s track record of disrupting any business it enters this is by no means a shoo-in.  As Google CEO Eric Schmidt explained: “We’ve been waiting a long, long time for this day.  It’s much harder to marry a 50-year-old technology and a brand new technology than those of us from the brand-new technology thought.”

The platform will launch in fall 2010. Google says Google TV will be built into a line of Sony made TVs and Blu-Ray players. Logitech will also launch a “companion box” so that users will be able to add Google TV to their existing setups. Intel is powering the chip set and Best Buy is partnering to sell the devices.  By: Paidcontent

Though Google reached out an olive branch to developers like Rovi in their announcement the more immediate challenge will come to companies like Boxee, Roku and TiVo when Sony begins manufacturing and selling its own Google TVs for the holidays. By: NewTeeVee

Need a dumbed down explanation of what this all means?  Nobody simplifies things better than Google themselves, which spins the tale (in text and YouTube animation) on their own Google Blog.

Oh yeah, remember that Google is really in the advertising sales business, so its payoff is not going to be in helping consumers surf their traditional channel set but to provide them with tidbits of indie-made video minutia and microchannels from its own YouTube and beyond so it can serve up the most relevant ad links.