You won’t find it on YouTube (a message explains that “licensing and permissions issues” prevent Google’s video site from showing the full event ) but Thursday’s unveiling of Google TV featured a demonstration by Bryan Perez, general manager of NBA Digital, writes FT Media Editor Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson.
A third-party content developer in a tech-heavy line-up at the Google I/O developer conference , Perez showed how fans could use the basketball association’s NBA.com application on their internet-enabled televisions to see video highlights, check scores and fantasy leagues, browse schedules or save games to their DVRs.
“We believe this space is poised for dramatic growth,” he told the FT on Friday. “We’ve seen projections that by 2013 one third of multi-channel households will have some internet-connected device with their TV.”
NBA Digital, a joint venture between the NBA and Turner Sports, hopes that this will help realise digital content owners’ dreams of tapping advertisers’ far larger television budgets. “With Google TV this starts to look and feel like TV for the [ad] buyer,” Perez said. “Even if that doesn’t pan out, you’re still able to sell these impressions to the digital guys, and probably at a premium” because their campaigns will look better on a big screen.
Bryan Perez
There was little technical cost to adapting its content for Google TV, he said: “Google TV is really [Google's] Chrome [browser] and Android merged, so to the extent you’re doing applications for mobile on the Android platform, you can develop applications for Google TV. The cost is thinking about the user experience. A website doesn’t work from 10 feet.”
Like UFC and MLB, the group has done a deal to put its NBA Game Time mobile app on Roku’s internet-connected set top box . It also launched an iPad app with much fanfare. (Asked how this has gone down, he said a little flatly: “It’s pretty early. We’re going to take a step back at the end of the playoffs and review it.”)
So despite the nice plug the I/O event gave NBA Digital, Perez says he is not picking sides. “It is not our decision. It’s the customer’s decision. I’m not going to tell the customer ‘You didn’t buy the right TV set or the right tablet computer’.”
