"It's Complicated": TV tries to date the Internet

This week, a new product hit electronic store shelves: Google TV. What? A new Google product? It must be perfect. A gem of electrical and computer engineering. The pinnacle, gold standard that will build an industry.

Well, maybe not so much.

Early reviews of the much-hyped Google TV interface have turned out to be not quite as positive as developers had hoped. While the masses can spend hours debating – and millions of dollars innovating – on how to best mash together TV and Internet, the answers to our innovation conundrum lie in the nature of our consumption. Techies and laypeople alike are finding that they simply can’t connect with the mega search engine’s attempt to blend television and the Internet.

Ultimately, the shortcomings of Google TV highlight our own attachment to the mind numbing experience of watching television.

People love television. 99 percent of all households in America have at least one TV and on average, a house will have 2.24 separate televisions, according to Neilsen reporting. This same report shows that an average American will spend 9 years of their life glued to their TV set. We enjoy doing nothing more than staring at a screen to e entertained by its content for a mindless 9 years of our life.

But that is exactly the problem: the task is mindless. The Internet ushered in a new age of access to knowledge and interactive experiences, enriching and evolving our own consumption of information. The new medium was an active experience that required attention and participation in order to get the desired result.

What has happened in today’s technology landscape is an attempt to take an active medium and mash it together with a passive one. Fundamentally, the intersection doesn’t exist. Yet, this does not mean that the two will never share a happy balance of Internet enabled television viewing.

As shown by web based apps like instant streaming from Netflix, Pandora online radio, Hulu and YouTube, it is possible to have a passive Internet experience. Moreover, studies show that people are capable of turning their brain to mush on Facebook and other Websites as they are with television.

Then why can’t we find a way to make people be passive on the Internet via their television?

As shown by Google TV’s lackluster entrance, the main issue has been translating the experience from the computer to the “old-school” small screen.

“By that much more exacting standard, Google TV feels like an incomplete jumble of good ideas only half-realized, an unoptimized box of possibility that suffers under the weight of its own ambition” said Nilay Patel of Engaget.com.

 Every aspect of the Internet has to be dumbed-down to the mindless nature of the Television. At the core of that process is finding a way to control the Internet in the same way one can control myriad different choices of content for the TV.

Ultimately, the innovation isn’t executed in current TV-based Internet devices. The problem is two-fold. First, the devices are physically underdeveloped. Manufacturers have to meet consumers halfway with the device they use to replace a mouse and keyboard. Expecting TV viewers to want to type with both hands in their lap on a conventional keyboard is like trying to vacuum with your hands. It’s extra work for something that you can easily just get done with a remote control. People are lazy at their televisions and at most, they want their controls to be at their thumbs.

“Because this thing is a computer, you have to use a separate remote,” explained Gizmodo.com. “With apps arriving in 2011, Google TV feels like a maid service that won't clean your bathroom.” 

 As referenced by Gizmodo, software needs to become streamlined and efficient as well. Staying with the laziness motif, the key to providing so much more information and accessibility to a task that used to be simply channel based means that software must make the web as easy as surfing channels. This will come in time, as its only now that a leading platform for such software to build off of has been introduced in Google TV.

The popularity and success of TV on the Internet clearly calls for merging of the two on the television. However, the reverse application has yet to work because manufacturers have neglected consumers’ personal neglect while they watch TV.

Ironically, technology now calls for a digression of complexity – needing to simplify in order to provide a more complex technology on our old favorite medium.