Google likes to make ripples, so last Thursday (5/20/10), it announced a new Google TV platform. What’s on the agenda is called a ‘platform,’ which in this case is software-speak for a programming structure provided by Google’s Android software protocols (for mobile computing), Google’s Chrome browser, and Adobe’s Flash Player 10 (for video presentation). Inserted into this structure will be products that take advantage of the heavy-lifting infrastructure provided by the platform. These products will be supplied by, among other companies, Sony, Logitech, Intel, Dish Network, and Best Buy. (You may have noticed the absence of: Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Samsung…among others.)

Google and friends expect to start bringing products to market this fall (pre-Christmas, of course). That will be the beginning of another experiment (WebTV anyone?), but this time with Google’s name and deep pockets. There are plenty of questions about hardware and software implementations, and especially about content – whose TV shows will it be presenting?

However, the prospect of Google-TV isn’t of itself so important, it’s a harbinger. Later, if not sooner, the content we’re accustomed to seeing on television (cable or broadcast) will be seen primarily over the Internet.

Why will the Internet eventually take over TV? In a word: distribution. If this form of television were tethered to personal computers, television set-top boxes or even laptops, well there are a lot of them, but they’re concentrated among the urban and relatively well-to-do. It’s the omnipresence of handheld devices, from smart phones to tablet computers (think iPad), that puts a potential internet television device into nearly every human hand. Already, even in the grip of third-world poverty, mobile phones are the most prevalent form of technology in the world. Over 4 billion people use or have access to a mobile phone device. That’s about 60% of humanity, a staggering number. Most of those phones are not Internet TV-ready, but in the normal churn of technology production, today’s smart phones become tomorrow’s cheap throw-away phones (the one’s most of the non-industrialized world routinely uses).

The economics of these numbers are manna for the content providers and the advertisers. The numbers aren’t bad for the hardware manufacturers either. Other means of distribution – broadcast, cable, disk (DVD, Blue Ray) – stand to lose their dominance, although it will be a long time before they disappear (if ever).

Will the Internet eventually take over distribution of just about everything digital? Yes. Probably. It’s not like there aren’t speed bumps (literally), or road-blocks (figuratively). For one thing the Internet pipes (the lines of transmission) aren’t generally big enough for reliably streaming video, which is to say that without fiber optic land lines and 5 megabit per second Wi-Fi (or equivalent), the speed of Internet transmission isn’t fast enough for TV video. Then too higher speed streaming needs to be combined with low cost, at or about the same level as today’s mobile phone. The optimum economics for this are not guaranteed, at least in the medium run (10-20 years). A potentially important economic complication is tied-up with what is called the ‘Net neutrality issue,’ where the companies that provide the Internet transmission want to charge the content providers for using more bandwidth – especially with streaming video.

Economics also involves competition between companies. There will inevitably be competing technologies – at the moment Google VS Apple comes to mind. In some cases, the competition will also spread to countries and regions, probably based on language separations. These various competitions will most likely fractionalize the Internet TV market, so even if there is a single transmission source (the Internet), it may be packaged in many different and probably incompatible ways. So? Is this very different from what we have now? Not really, except the ever-present ethos of the Internet to provide universal access to information, which in this case includes the decidedly un-informative aspects of television.