The marriage of tech and media is definitely a rocky one at times, and Web TV is no exception. Despite all promises, like all relationships things are always evolving between tech and media – and sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. The latest tech / media couple in trouble appears to be Logitech and Google. With the rocky start to Google TV (the biggest player in Web TV so far), Logitech is also hung up in every way possible. Why? They supply the tech end of Google TV with the Revue Google TV set-top box.
Google TV is a pretty cool product – and quite possibly the future of ALL television – or at least a glimpse of it, providing access to live TV, on-demand programming, recorded shows, pay TV, online video clips and, of course, the web.
Will Web TV replace regular TV any time soon? Probably not. But don’t count Google (or Logitech) out of the running. Someone’s going to nab the real estate on Web TV, and for their part, Logitech is willing to continue the union. In fact, they’re lowering the price to make the hardware accessible to almost anybody.
Losing the market share before one is really created is obviously not an outcome that Logitech will go for. In fact Logitech’s Chairman, Guerrino De Luca, was quoted this week as saying: “There was a significant gap between our price and the value perceived by the consumer.”
Market share is the moral of the story for both the data and the technology side of the equation right now. Any day now Google TV should be accessible by Android, and with 130 million users, that is a big deal. For now, Logitech has chosen to bite the revenue bullet and get more customers. That means a lower price in order to boost the real estate for Google.
It’s hard to imagine Apple or Sony supporting the music industry by lowering the price of hardware to encourage market participation, but if this is an indication of what might work, then Blu-Ray may actually still stand a chance.