The app market has been in the center of news for almost a year now. First it was Apple, with their iPhone and iPad and their famous Apple App Store. This is one single window for the control of apps that can be delivered to an Apple device. With the app store in place, the smartphone got smarter, so isn’t it time for the Google TV to get smarter also. Yes, Logitech, one of the key partners of Google responsible for the launch of the Google TV platforms, with their Logitech Revue has announced the long awaited Google TV App Store.
The Android is growing and beyond the smartphone and tablet markets, the Android is spreading its wings, slowly and steadily into the Google TV platform markets also. The Google TV platform is basically a combination of access to videos, shows, apps, websites, all on your HDTV at home, besides all your usual TV channels and the interesting Digital Video Recording facility.
The Google TV has not gained much acclaim and penetration into the market, due to the shortcomings of availability of the right apps for the product to spur the enthusiasm required in the non-tech user marketplace. Although the concept of smart TV is catching on slowly, various issues like bandwidth availability, personalization aspects from other Google services, functionality addition, set top box integration with Google TV support, methodologies of access to Pay TV content, Video On Demand content availability, quality issues etc. need to addressed carefully, before this conceptual change can take the market by storm.
After a series of launches of high profile devices, including the Google TV, Apple TV, Roku, Boxee and others, content is the main issue and Netflix seems to be, one of the major contenders in the US, with a decent reach. Amazon bought the European LoveFilm, a similar operator like Netflix in Europe announcing prime membership, commercial free, instant streaming of over 5000 movies and TV shows at no additional costs. Sony announced 5 new products powered by Google TV, Samsung launched products with processors in-built, with their eyes on Smart TV introduction. Google has been busy developing an array of web UI libraries for web designers’ optimization of their sites for Google TV. App developers on the Android market have been coming up with various apps to enhance user experience on the new platform. The Android smartphone apps and the Chrome Webstore have been fairly well developed as logical platforms by Google, however, the Google TV app platform is yet to become popular.
Announcements have been made by Logitech regarding the app market for the Google TV, towards better integration of the web and TV, with proposed capabilities and functionalities, including Live Tweeting during a television broadcast. This would definitely be a value addition to Google TV. A new perspective to IPTV is on the go.
