Are Apple and Google Being Forced Out Of TV?

Over the past three months the news around Google and Apple has been about wearables -specifically about Glass and iWatch. But go back six months and the talk was all about TV. So why not now?

This time last year, Apple watchers expected an Apple TV to launch, priced at around $2,000 - to go with that little TV-web streaming box they now sell so successfully but without fanfare. Google had a raft of deals lined up with TV makers.

Both have the web content (iTunes, apps, YouTube) to feed a TV stream. But both have gone curiously quiet about the TV side of their businesses, despite the fact that at Apple, Steve Jobs envisaged TV as the fourth leg of the Apple empire, behind Macs, the iPhone and iPod/iTunes.

The attraction of TV has long been in its centrality in the household, though for Apple and Google it's been more of a channel for content.

But in the old days control the TV meant you might also control other household functions, like remote control of the air conditioning. Microsoft was early into TV operating systems for that reason.

Today smart TV makers want an apps developer community to jazz up the screen interaction and they are looking at integrating many of the functions in the different consoles that connect to the TV, so think X-Box gesture control built-in to your Samsung. Ultimately they could be your gaming console, TV and web device. And then there is the capacity to offer ads across all devices, from mobile, to ultra to TV.

In the case of Apple, as Apple Insider points out, Apple's existing TV product is a small business by Apple standards. It is categorized within "Accessories" with all of Apple's hardware peripherals and first and third party accessories (ranging from headphones to cases). It's a business that is slowly sinking into insignificance whereas it could have grown into a central console for home control.

Apple's Tim Cook calls TV a hobby. And as Venture Beat points out it is in the shadow of smartphones:

Cook said that Apple sold a total of 5.3 million Apple TVs this fiscal year, almost double the 2.8 million it sold in 2011. But those numbers are still tiny in comparison to, say,  the 26.9 million iPhones Apple sold in just the last quarter.

But here's another take. The actual TV market - the screens we spend too much time staring at - is owned by Korean manufacturers. Principally by Apple's new arch rival, Samsung, and by LG.

As Ars Technica reported in late February, LG recently bought WebOs from HP, specifically for use in smart TVs. It will continue to be an open source project. Samsung meanwhile has its own smart TV that serves developers of iOS, Windows and Android.

So does Apple  see a bigger project here, one where the existing TV manufacturers will, anyway, provide their own web and mobile connectivity, one where it is just too difficult to compete with the market? Better to back off.

Which brings us to Google. GigaOm put the Web OS purchase into perspective a few days back:

That’s bad news for Google TV, but it also shows how Google’s living room play has been changing over recent months. Google originally courted a number of big TV manufacturers for Google TV, with the idea of having the system embedded in a wide variety of TV sets. Sony was one of the first to make Google TVs, LG came on board for the second generation, and Samsung seemed to be ready to go Google as well by early 2012.

A year later, things look very different: Samsung’s Google TV never materialized. Sony stopped selling Google TV sets and instead opted for a companion box. And now, LG is buying its own smart TV operating system.

That's going to force Google into a companion box solution, according to GigaOm, whereas a year ago it looked as though it could do in TVs what it was doing with the Nexus.

And not long ago Informa was saying that the smart TV would use Android as the default OS. Wired, a year ago, was convinced it was the key to Samsung TV's future- but is this wishful thinking? Samsung could use Tizen and LG will use Web OS.

There is an OS rebellion going on in Asia, evidenced by last week's claim from China that Android is too powerful. While Google worries about Samsung's power in the Android ecosystem, Samsung and LG seem to have decided that Android is not necessarily for them. And as they develop their smart sets maybe it is Apple and Google who will be left out in the cold. Hand me those Glasses.

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