With social Media so pervasive today, it’s captured the imagination of Hollywood moguls in treatments for the big screen. With movies exploring the origins of Facebook, and a Google movie under development by Groundswell Productions, is it any wonder that the Internet giants would also be thinking about adapting to the small screen and integrating with desk top computers and mobile devices as well?
Twitter TV
While Twitter isn’t contemplating developing their own TV, they are very eager to harness the vast amount of information, links and real-time events into a news network of sorts. According to a recent Reuters release, a Twitter news network would not necessarily be run by Twitter itself, but would be in partnership with several news organizations similar to a newswire.
"From the very beginning this has seemed almost as if it’s a newswire coming from everywhere around the world," co-founder Biz Stone told Reuters Television on the sidelines of the Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford technology event. "I think a Twitter News Service would be something that would be very open and shared with many different news organizations around the world."
Google TV
Google TV would be a content-aggregating platform around which it could be supported by YouTube video content and video ads. At this year’s Google I/O Conference in San Francisco, 3000 developers were tasked with starting to create applications for its TV platform, similar to what Apple did to build its vast inventory of applications for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.
Apple TV
The fly-in-the-ointment for Google developers is consideration by these third party developers as to how Apple TV will evolve. According to a ReelSEO report, "Apple TV has debuted to a lovely fanfare with an arguably superior-UI and much easier setup compared to the Google offering." The primary downside would be the limitations Apple has in regards to content. Presently, they only have the iTunes library.
Facebook TV
With the recent Hulu partnership with the social network, Facebook is offering users the ‘Watch Now’ functionality which links to the site. The Hulu platform presently offers ad-supported streaming video of TV shows and movies from NBC, Fox, ABC and many other cable networks.
ReelSEO theorizes that "Facebook TV" would be a light web-based app for your TV, set-top box, desktop or mobile phone. It would then aggregate content via the Web, allowing users to access their favorite videos from Hulu and YouTube. Alongside, you would be able to click on the feeds of your friends’ latest videos as well.
You could then invite your online FBers to watch any of this content in real-time concurrently, while sending update status entries with comments and critiques. The report favored FB over all other Internet TV options. It felt Facebook would outshine the TV approaches made by Google and Apple because of their social interactivity, 500+ million user base and their built-in Facebook Credits’ micropayment system.
So what’s your thoughts reader? Which TV platform has the greatest potential of becoming the leader in this space? Or is there room for all four entities to co-exist?
