Google TV Explained In 141 Seconds

Google published a video explaining its forthcoming Google TV product earlier today.
The video doesn't tell us much we didn't know already: Google TV, available both from a set-top box and built-in to select televisions from Sony, will provide new ways to search for and record existing television content, as well as allowing people to display online content on their televisions.
The product looks fine, as far as we can tell, but the video itself is pretty underwhelming. It is narrated in a PSA-like monotone, and is thin on detail. As ever with Google, it's difficult to tell whether the company thinks this is an important new business or just another side project.
At least some people think Google is on to something big here. If so, it needs to do a lot more to sell the idea:

Why I Caved, Bought Cable TV, And Gave Up On My 'Hulu Household'

have a confession to make.
Late last month, I walked into the Time Warner Cable store on East 23rd Street in Manhattan and sat down with a saleswoman. I left a few minutes later with a bright orange shopping bag, a new Scientific Atlanta digital cable box, and $80+ monthly digital cable subscription.
Okay, that's not too out-of-the-ordinary. Time Warner Cable added 56,000 new digital TV subscribers last quarter, finishing the year with almost 9 million subs. I wasn't alone.
But by buying cable, I was a failure. I was admitting defeat. I was caving in to The Man.
Why? Because I'm the guy who, almost two years ago, returned my Time Warner Cable set-top box to that same store on 23rd Street. I proudly vowed to get all of my TV content from the Internet forever -- becoming a "Hulu household," as I called it.

Sorry, There's No Way To Save The TV Business

The traditional TV industry--cable companies, networks, and broadcasters--is where the newspaper industry was about five years ago:
In denial.
There are murmurings on the edges about how longstanding business models will come under pressure as Internet distribution takes over.  But, so far, the revenue and profits are hanging in there, so the big TV companies don't really care.
Specifically, the TV industry's attitude is the same as the newspaper industry's attitude was circa 2002-2003: Stop calling us dinosaurs: We get digital; We're growing our digital businesses; We're investing in digital platforms; People still recall ads even when they fast-forward through them on DVRs; There's no substitute for TV ads.  And traditional TV isn't going away: Just look at our revenue and profits!
After saying all this same stuff for years, the newspaper industry figured out the hard way that, eventually, reality intrudes, that you can't stuff the genie back in the bottle.  And over the next 5-10 years, the TV industry will figure this out, too.
Here's the problem in a nutshell:
As with print-based media, Internet-based distribution generates only a tiny fraction of the revenue and profit that today's incumbent cable, broadcast, and satellite distribution models do.  As Internet-based distribution gains steam, therefore, most TV industry incumbents will no longer be able to support their existing cost structures.
Specifically, TV business models for the past half-century, from broadcast to cable to satellite, have been built on the following foundation:

Touting Redesign, MSNBC Declares Pageviews ‘Dead’

The big idea behind just about every website redesign these days generally revolves around “less is more” minimalism. But it looks like MSNBC.com’s redo actually means it: the new site, which just went fully live, promises to do an end with clicking on stories and on ads. By introducing a single-page-only format, the company hopes to sell large, customizable ads to marketers as it tries to build a larger audience.
It is also promising to swear off reduce the use “standalone” slideshows, something that has become a staple of many news sites to drive pageview counts as a way of measuring audience usage and engagement to advertisers—instead relying mostly on slideshows that are “integrated,” though the difference was a bit unclear (update: Commenter Jason Lotito correctly points out that integrated slideshows “are part of the page, and don’t require you clicking to the next page.”). As a rep for the cable net told us,“Msnbc.com is in the business of selling advertiser experiences, not ad units.”