Announcing Google TV: TV meets web. Web meets TV.

If there’s one entertainment device that people know and love, it’s the television. In fact, 4 billion people across the world watch TV and the average American spends five hours per day in front of one*. Recently, however, an increasing amount of our entertainment experience is coming from our phones and computers. One reason is that these devices have something that the TV lacks: the web. With the web, finding and accessing interesting content is fast and often as easy as a search. But the web still lacks many of the great features and the high-quality viewing experience that the TV offers.

So that got us thinking...what if we helped people experience the best of TV and the best of the web in one seamless experience? Imagine turning on the TV and getting all the channels and shows you normally watch and all of the websites you browse all day — including your favorite video, music and photo sites. We’re excited to announce that we’ve done just that.

Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.

Google TV uses search to give you an easy and fast way to navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies. For example, already know the channel or program you want to watch? Just type in the name and you’re there. Want to check out that funny YouTube video on your 48” flat screen? It’s just a quick search away. If you know what you want to watch, but you’re not sure where to find it, just type in what you’re looking for and Google TV will help you find it on the web or on one of your many TV channels. If you’d rather browse than search, you can use your standard program guide, your DVR or the Google TV home screen, which provides quick access to all of your favorite entertainment so you’re always within reach of the content you love most.

Because Google TV is built on open platforms like Android and Google Chrome, these features are just a fraction of what Google TV can do. In our announcement today at Google I/O, we challenged web developers to start coming up with the next great web and Android apps designed specifically for the TV experience. Developers can start optimizing their websites for Google TV today. Soon after launch, we’ll release the Google TV SDK and web APIs for TV so that developers can build even richer applications and distribute them through Android Market. We've already started building strategic alliances with a number of companies — like Jinni.com and Rovi — at the leading edge of innovation in TV technology. Jinni.com is a next-generation TV application working to provide semantic search, personalized recommendation and social features for Google TV across all sources of premium content available to the user. Rovi is one of the world's leading guide applications. We’re looking forward to seeing all of the ways developers will use this new platform.

We’re working together with Sony, Logitech and Intel to put Google TV inside of televisions, Blu-ray players and companion boxes. These devices will go on sale this fall, and will be available at Best Buy stores nationwide. You can sign up here to get updates on Google TV availability.

This is an incredibly exciting time — for TV watchers, for developers and for the entire TV ecosystem. By giving people the power to experience what they love on TV and on the web on a single screen, Google TV turns the living room into a new platform for innovation. We're excited about what’s coming. We hope you are too.



*Nielsen, Three Screen Report, Fourth Quarter 2009

Update 2:26PM: Updated to include more information about other developers.
Update on 5/27/2010: Updated to include additional information about partners.

Update on 6/15/2010: Below, we've added a new video that demos Google TV's features.

Posted by Salahuddin Choudhary, Google TV Product Manager

Android Froyo, with some sprinkles

Since launching the first Android-powered phone with T-Mobile in October 2008, we have worked with operators, handset manufacturers and developers to make Android one of the most useful, innovative mobile platforms available.

We've been thrilled by the adoption of the platform over the past year and a half. Every day, our partners sell more than 100,000 new Android-based handsets, and there are now more than 180,000 active Android developers who have contributed more than 50,000 apps now available in Android Market—up 12,000 since last month alone!

Today at I/O, our annual developer conference, we announced Android 2.2. Codenamed Froyo (for frozen yogurt), this seventh update to the Android platform brings some great new functionality to users (things like making your handset a portable hotspot and support for Adobe Flash within the browser), along with new tools for developers. Read more about the specifics of Froyo on our Android Developer Blog.

Posted by Andy Rubin, VP, Engineering

Google I/O 2010 Day 1: A more powerful web in more places

Today at Moscone West in San Francisco, we’re kicking off our largest developer conference of the year, Google I/O. Over two days, 5,000 people from 66 countries will hear from 200 speakers, see 180+ developer demonstrations and participate in more than 90 technical sessions, breakouts and fireside chats to meet engineers from Google and partner companies.

At last year's I/O, we demonstrated the potential of HTML5. Since then, the web has moved from a promising platform to a compelling setting for developers to build apps. This week we’ll celebrate this ongoing evolution of the web and share some of our latest work in moving the web forward and keeping it open.

Today we're announcing Google App Engine for Business, which offers new features that enable companies to build internal applications on the same reliable, scalable and secure infrastructure that we at Google use for our own apps. For greater cloud portability, we’re also teaming up with VMware to make it easier for companies to build rich web apps and deploy them to the cloud of their choice or on-premise. In just one click, users of the new versions of SpringSource Tool Suite and Google Web Toolkit can deploy their application to Google App Engine for Business, a VMware environment or other infrastructure, such as Amazon EC2.

There are already lots of great apps out on the web, but there hasn’t been one destination where you could easily find them. Our new Chrome Web Store is an open marketplace for web apps that helps people find the best web applications across the Internet and allows developers to reach new users. We also joined other web companies in announcing WebM, an open web media format project and open-sourced VP8, a high-quality, web-optimized video codec, that we are contributing to the project under a royalty-free license.

We’re pleased to share some updates to our APIs too. Last year, we announced the Google Maps API v3, which was designed to be faster and optimized for mobile devices. Today this API is graduating from Code Labs and is enterprise-ready as part of Google Maps API Premier. We’re also announcing new ways for publishers to improve the relevance of their AdSense ads, a brand-new version of the Feed API with push updates that make the latest PubSubHubbub-enabled feed data available without requiring visitors to refresh pages, and a library of high-quality open-source web fonts, accessible to everyone through the new Google Font API.

Finally, last year we introduced a new way to communicate and collaborate called Google Wave. Today we’re opening Wave to everyone — no invitation necessary — at wave.google.com, as part of Google Labs. Google Apps administrators can also enable it for their domains and help groups of people work together more productively. To learn more about this, our many new API features and more open-source code for developers, visit the Wave Developer blog.

For lots more about Google I/O 2010, visit http://code.google.com/events/io/ and follow us on the Code Blog, Twitter @googleio (#io2010) and Buzz.

Posted by Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering