Google TV is to support the company’s Android Market application store early next year, the company announced this week. Google TV will be switched on in the US in the next few weeks, followed by a worldwide rollout from 2011, and the company wants to integrate its application store into the offering.
“Soon we will be bringing tens of thousands of the same applications you can get on your mobile phone to your TV,” revealed Google TV product marketing manager Brittany Bohnet. “We are going to be launching support for Android Market in early 2011. TV, the full Web, tens of thousands of applications. Google TV gives you access to more entertainment than any other living room device you have ever experienced.”
Bohnet didn’t go into details about how the apps will be delivered. It could mean a set of pre-approved apps or an entire app store in the mode of the forthcoming Chrome web apps store.
By merging its TV and app offerings, Google will be one step ahead of rival Apple, which last week announced plans to launch its own TV service but shied away from uniting it with its app store just yet. Meanwhile Samsung is on course to compete with Google, having already promoted its fledgling apps proposition for Internet-connected TVs to prospective developers.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt was also quizzed this week on what he thought the future held for his company’s apps business. “iPad apps have really shown a very good model, it’s a closed model very tied to the Apple platform, and I say that as a proud former Apple board member,” he reflected. “We have taken an approach that apps will be Web resident, so the apps will be running inside of browsers and will be just as powerful. We also have a marketplace in Android that has many tens of thousands of apps and growing very quickly, so I think the good news is there will be many, many apps, there will be more than one style of apps and the platforms [we will offer] will all have very powerful applications over the next few years.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment