10 Executive Summary Embracing change
“We can be a partner not a competitor to the TV industry”
Matt Brittin President, Google Europe
Region: EMEA Interviewed by: Adrian Pennington
Underlining its 'don't be evil' motto to an audience perhaps wary of the power of this internet behemoth, Google's Europe president Matt Brittin stressed: “We are not predators, we are partners.”
His IBC2014 keynote
'Transforming TV and Beyond: Google's vision of video for everyone, by everyone and everywhere’ focused on disarming the audience of fears about Google's plans for TV domination.
“In technology the [technical] language gets in the way,” Brittin said. “TV is simply a device and is just a way of connecting people to sight, sound and motion content. Broadcasting is not going to die and people will continue to watch TV in 50 years or more. But they will also be watching on mobile.” Some 2.5 billion people are connected to the web globally today, a figure likely to double by the end of the decade. The five billion dollar question, though, is whether Google is going to start investing and commissioning its own original content a la Amazon and Netflix.
no evil Still doing
Not yet, was Brittin's answer. “Who knows what will happen in the future. We gave advances based on ad revenues to a number of production companies a couple of years ago and on some we lost and on some we won. That wasn't strictly commissioning but encouraging professional content creation companies to use our platform. That remains the right model for us. By being a platform built around a user community who can share and curate content, and by offering a set of tools to monetise content, we can be a partner, not a competitor, to the TV industry.” He claimed: “We don't know anything about your industry but we do think we know about technology platforms.” These he identified as Android, Chromecast and YouTube. Brittin's plea was for content owners, creators and broadcasters to partner with it on these.
One of the things Google is
looking at is connecting the big screen to the multi-screen. “The set today as a device is a bit like a 2006 mobile phone,” he said. He argued that just as Android had hugely simplified the process of developing for mobile, so Google is
concentrated on trying to make the TV experience as great as the experience on the mobile device.
“The biggest and most expensive screen is the one which is hardest to interact with and to operate. That shouldn't be the case,” he said. “We need to make the web work on TV. It's very simple to take an app built on Android for mobile and transfer it to TV. We think consumers want that experience across devices and working with Android we can take the TV of 2006 to the 2015 TV world in one single leap.”
It was pointed out that Google had attempted to crack TV before with Google TV. What lessons were learned from its failure? “If you are a tech company focussing on innovation and if are not trying and failing you are not trying hard enough,” was Brittin's answer. “Android on TV will drive innovation in OS,” he insisted. “Because it's free to use and an open system there are lots of discussions on the ways different people want to use it. Plus it has scale. You can take an app and you can scale it with Android over Chromecast or if you're in pay TV you can use Android to improve the user experience while moving at the development pace of mobile.” Having graduated from Cambridge University (where he came second in the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race) Brittin's career has spanned the newspaper industry, McKinsey & Co and real estate. He has also won World Championship medals rowing for Great Britain, was a member of the 1988 Olympic team, and more recently raised funds for the Paralympics by cycling the length of Britain, mostly in the rain.
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