Google is finding more ways to take on Apple’s empire — in devices, Web services and now in the television market.
On June 27, Day 1 of the Google I/O conference at Moscone West in San Francisco, the company announced its powerful new Nexus 7 tablet PC. On June 28, the company announced in a blog post that its new Google Play cloud service — which is now natively installed on Android smartphones and tablets — will become available on Google TV devices by the end of the summer.
This means that Google Play applications, games, TV shows, music and movies will be playable on new Google TV devices that soon will be hitting the markets. They will be able to be channeled through the forthcoming Google Nexus Q entertainment hub, which will also be coming out later this summer.
The Q is a new globe-like, cloud-based device that streams photos, audio and video from Googles cloud (and Google+) into any room in a home. It is portable and accessible from any Android device. See Slides 11, 12 and 13 here for more information.
Apple, which has offered television interconnection hubs to its computers for years, also has its own branded television planned for fall availability, according to several published reports. That new TV is expected to not only feature either a high-definition, 42-inch or 55-inch LCD screen but also a Siri search interface and compatibility with third-party devices.
Google Already Has Content Lined Up
Google said June 27 that it has already partnered for content with several major movie and television producers, including Disney, ABC, CBS, NBC Universal, Sony Pictures, Paramount, and a number of others.
The company also said it has more than 100,000 TV episodes and movies already available in the Google Play app.
Like Apple, Google Play also enables users to store their own music in its cloud-based service — or on storage devices at home — and stream it from any Android device, including the forthcoming Q. As the result of the June 28 announcement, users also will be able to access their music through the Google cloud on its own TV devices.