Richard Martin Blog: Can Google Save TV?

When Jeff Zucker was fired from his post as CEO of NBC Universal last month, his canning generated a level of schadenfreude unusual even by Hollywood standards. As Jimmy Kimmel said on his late-night show, “It hasn’t been a good decade for NBC."

In fact, it hasn’t been a good decade for the TV industry as a whole. Beset by dwindling viewership, competition from the Web and a creative vacuum relieved only by standout cable-produced series like “The Sopranos" and “The Wire," traditional broadcast networks and the studios that supply them with drek like “Get Me Out of Here – I’m A Celebrity!" have watched their business crumble almost as fast as the big record labels. Jeff Zucker, who managed to take NBC from first place to fourth place among the major broadcast networks, was only the prime exemplar of the dissolution of the business he grew up in.

The only things that make money on TV these days are “American Idol" and NFL football. Even the Olympics are no longer the guaranteed cash machine they once were.

Now, along come Google and Apple – both of which have unveiled new, enhanced versions of their fledgling Web/TV hybrid services in recent weeks – to toss the last spadeful of dirt on the coffin of the TV business as it has been for the last half-century. Since I blogged about Google TV earlier this year, the forces driving Internet TV, and shrinking conventional TV, have only grown stronger. The TV studios now live in a world where a critically lauded show like “Lone Star" can be yanked after two episodes. 

Only, these new competitors might actually be the salvation of TV, not its slayer.

That’s because, in a word, both Apple TV and Google TV open up new potential revenue streams for a business that has seen its core advertising revenues fall by 10 to 15 percent a year in recent years. The two tech giants offer radically different visions and business models for the future of TV. Apple sees the living room screen essentially as an extension of its iPhone/iTunes ecosystem: a closed system wherein viewers enhance the traditional viewing experience via the now-familiar 99-cent download experience.

“In typical Apple fashion, the platform is still very closed and very restrictive," blogged Sam Diaz of ZDNet, “and still very tied to iTunes."

But if viewers are willing to pay 99 cents to watch “Lost" reruns on their iPad, or slightly more to view of “Inception" in HD from their couches, then the networks and the studios will have an ongoing source of new revenue that, in theory, could be limitless. Think what iTunes has done for, say, the back catalogue of the Carpenters. It’s a classic long tail model that could fund the production of more narrowly focused, risky fare – as opposed to endless spinoffs of “Dancing With The Stars."

Google TV is powerful in an entirely different way. Providing instant access to movies-on-demand from Amazon and Netflix, music streaming from Pandora and Napster, real-time news from The New York Times and USA Today, the platform will blend TV-watching and Web-surfing in heretofore undreamt-of ways.

“The coolest thing about Google TV is that we don’t even know what the coolest thing about it will be," the company said on its new TV Web site. The openness of the Google platform gives third-party developers a powerful incentive to deliver new apps that will capture new audiences that have, in many cases, given up on conventional TV already.

One thing is sure: Whatever forms Google TV winds up taking, they will surely include Google ads that have fueled the search giant’s astonishing growth over the last decade. The networks are now angling for a cut of that revenue, and they’ll almost certainly get it, even if on terms that Schmidt, Brin, et al dictate.

Imagine combining regular full-game broadcasts with the NFL’s Red Zone service, which has already transformed Sunday afternoons for millions of pigskin junkies, and real-time online fantasy football apps. The mind boggles.

Typically, the traditional TV industry has thus far, for the most part, reacted to the advent of IPTV with a mixture of trepidation, wishful blindness, and magical thinking. That can’t last. And once the executives in Manhattan and Studio City wake up, they’ll realize the great opportunity that the spread of Internet TV presents. Who knows, maybe Jeff Zucker will get there first.