Big news with the announcement of Google TV at Google I/O. This is a huge leap forward and actually brings the term interactive television closer to the expectation of it’s namesake. For a long time “interactive” with regard to television has been limited to basic playback controls, content streams, advertisements, SMS votes and other lower level transactions that pass for interaction, but really don’t make it “interactive” in the sense we’ve long had the appetite and aptitude for.
Armed with Googles massive library of API’s and android’s extensive open source penetration, this thing is gonna take the world by storm. Integration with phones, offers the opportunity to split the same TV ‘event’ experience across multiple users within a single context (ex. the living room). I with my phone, you with yours, in the same room can dually mediate a shared experience. Not augmented via telepresence like parallel play but colocation, actual you-me-now socializing. More like a video game, but entirely different. Most often, video games provide agency within a narrative. A compelling method, no doubt, but Google TV is poised to offer a different sort of communal screen based activity, more group collaboration.
