Google Falls in Love with Television - Possible Opportunities

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If it does become a service – and Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, has said that the company’s work on audio and video processes will show up eventually in real products – Google will be betting that a lot of people will want to have this kind of experience. It will also be betting that a lot of advertisers will be interested in reaching these people. From the consumer’s point of view, it would be rather different from commercials that actually interrupt the program; rather than zapping the advertisements, as with TiVo, you could simply ignore them. Something that is less intrusive is usually considered to be less obnoxious – and if it’s actually relevant, a viewer might be willing to pay attention.

It would also be very different from the advertisers’ point of view. Commercials are usually squeezed in to specific points in a program, and, as mentioned, they interrupt the action. There are a limited number of slots. With this system, however, relevant content could crop up on the web at literally any moment in a program. “Say I’m an advertiser, and I would like a link to my website to appear with a specific episode of Seinfeld,” Fink explains. “We could open each moment of audio to a bidding process. The Google model of advertisers bidding for related words on Web pages, which has proved to be very successful online, could be carried over.”

Again, though, it works best if enough users are interested in getting relevant content in this way. And even though they won’t be giving up their privacy by revealing their living room conversations, they will be giving up some information: their TV viewing habits. Whether Google will do anything with this information beyond serving ads and creating social connections with others watching the same thing (and whether users will be comfortable with it) is another question. We all get to stay tuned in the coming months for the answer.

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