With the recent news that Youtube now has TV shows on it, and the ever converging broadcast and online media, the next step surely is Google’s move into television broadcasting. Surely it is only a matter of time before you can switch on your TV and the first thing you see will be a Google search screen, where you simply type in the show you want, and up pops 1,436,000 shows that meet your search criteria.
This is all very well, and it is certainly progress, but with the several hundred digital channels already available, will the transition to potentially millions of channels spell the end for high-quality programming? Experts have been saying for years that with so many more channels, the quality has to go down, but it could be argued that we haven’t seen any dramatic drop in programme quality over the last few years, it’s just that we’ve had to sift through a lot more rubbish on the way to finding what we want to watch. It seems almost inevitable that this amount of poor programming will just continue to increase exponentially, as we have more and more choice available.
The concept of Youtube since the very beginning was that everyone with access to a video camera (which let’s face it means everyone with access to a phone) would be able to broadcast themselves. How long before that freedom to broadcast is extended to our TV screens? Within the next year or two I suspect.
For brands in particular this is an exciting time. Television advertising space is cheaper than ever, and there are so many more options to advertise to specific markets on specific channels at specific times of the day. With Search TV as I like to call it, brands will be able to have their ad displayed before a programme which has been searched for on Google seconds before. The viewer wants to watch a show about cooking their favourite food for example, so types ‘thai cookery show’ into their Google TV (using their Google Remote of course), and seconds later, they have found thousands of shows that they might want to watch, and each one is sponsored by a different food or drink brand specific to their search term.
The potential for revenue for whoever controls the search part of this process is massive, and whatever you think will happen in this mass convergence of television, internet, advertising, phones and video, you have to admit that Google, yet again, seems to be the one holding all the cards.
