Connected TV market will deliver opportunities for Google TV, says Kothari

Google still believes there will be “a lot of opportunity” for its Google TV platform as the connected TV market evolves, despite the lack of success of the initial version of the platform, according to Suveer Kothari, head of international, Google TV.

“A lot of people are watching connected TVs, and as the space evolves we believe there will be a lot of opportunities,” Kothari said in response to questions after delivering a keynote at Informa’s OTTtv World Summit in London. “We hope we can bring a nice open operating system into that space. As you have seen we launched version 2 of Google TV and there have been significant changes to the platform.”

Kothari said that Google was “working hard to launch [Google TV] outside the US”. He said that the company was working to launch internationally next year but that it had no firm plans as yet.

Kothari said that, while the original version of the platform had been very computer centric, Google had learned lessons, such as reducing the amount of text-based content and bringing the Android market to the new version. He said that version 2 was attracting a lot of interest from application developers as a result.

On Google’s positioning in the TV market, Kothari said Google TV was an operating system. “Other parts of Google are experimenting in different areas. We are looking for areas where we can bring benefits to users. That explains why we are doing things on YouTube and [launching] fibre services in Kansas,” he said.

On relations with content providers he said that Google was “seeing a lot of content owners build apps for Google TV now” and reiterated that there had been a lot of misunderstanding about what Google was trying to achieve with the platform originally.