Android TV – Into the mix.

The cable companies and the console makers have the advantage.

• Not to be outdone by Amazon, Google is also having another stab at TV with the release of another entertainment offering called Android TV.
• The biggest change that Google has made is that it has given up trying to make a unified user experience across all devices but instead has optimised the UI for the TV itself.
• Google has taken away the fancy features such as telephony and cameras and focused solely on the delivery of content to the user.
• This basically puts Android TV in line with all of the other, increasingly numerous and difficult to distinguish offerings such as Fire TV, Apple TV, Roku and so on.
• All of the usual suspects such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Pandora Hulu etc will have their apps on the device and Google is encouraging developers to write apps for this new platform.  
• How this fits in with Chromecast is uncertain as Chromecast runs entirely on the web with no need to write apps.
• I suspect that Google will keep both going in parallel as Chromecast has already sold a lot of units and Google will need to know which offering users prefer.
• At the end of the day Android TV is very similar to all of the other offerings out there which means that none of them will be able to really differentiate.
• Only two camps are capable of doing this: the cable TV companies and the console makers.
• The cable TV companies still have a vast share of the audience on their platforms and consequently I suspect that the opportunity for them is to incorporate this functionality into their boxes.
• This will give the user the ability to have all of his services in one place with one remote control.
• The cable TV companies have, until recently, been in denial with regards to Internet TV but they are now looking at ways of upgrading their boxes to allow the other services their users love.
• This will put their offering head and shoulders above a new entrant requiring another box and another remote control.
• The cable user base is both sticky and not very well informed.
• The console makers also have an edge as their boxes offer something that none of the others do which is high end gaming.
• I suspect that this will appeal only to gamers but with 80m XBox users already out there, this is an opportunity big enough to be of significant value.
• Hence, I think that the Internet TV offerings are going to struggle without something differentiated to sell to the user.
• Amazon has its Prime users but these are reasonably small in number
• Hence, I suspect that all Google will have to compete with will be price but I can’t see it making the content cheaper to get a few users in the door.
• Hence, I suspect that this offering will languish just as its predecessor did.
• It is clear that the value remains in the ability to offer some degree of exclusive function or content and I do not expect success of any offering that cannot live up to that minimum standard.