Research firm Xyologic released a bunch of statistics about Google TV today. And those statistics point squarely at the amazing lack of app installs on the platform. Granted, these aren’t official numbers from Google or anything, but they seem quite believable (except for the whole Napster as #1 app thing, which is just bizarre, but then again, so are apps on your TV). Here’s the top 10 chart:
Source: RWW
So, people don’t want to download apps on their TVs eh? I guess I’m going to go with the whole “I told you so” as my commentary (and I wrote that piece well over a year ago).
TV isn’t about apps. It isn’t about technology. It isn’t about “interacting.” And most tech startups seem to want to make it a lot more about apps, technology and interaction. Which is probably the leading indicator of why most TV-related ventures crash and burn – unfortunately too many of the folks involved are far removed from the typical TV audience.
I’d go so far as to say “TV isn’t about entertainment” when push comes to shove. I think the best word to use to think about TV is “escape.”
There’s a reason channel surfing still beats out DVR usage, and why cord cutting is still not really a mainstream behavior. Using your DVR or browsing content lineups is not about “escape”. It’s about “work”.
The more the industry tries to get people to “work” for simple, enjoyable TV viewing, the more the industry will be littered with failures. The same is true in the Smart TV space, the Social TV space, the Connected TV space, etc etc etc. Keep in mind, as it is so very relevant, the concept of the paradox of choice: the more options and “power” you give a consumer, the more you will probably just be frustrating them. It’s pretty hard to beat the experience of good ol’ TV today, period.
So if you are building a platform, an app, an experience, a gadget, a whatever to “improve” TV, think about the concept: “are you helping people escape?” If not, it might be time for a “pivot.”
Honestly, I don’t even think there ARE that many googletv devices out there. i don’t know where these number could come from, other than from some other android environment, or dev environment. It can’t be that sony say, has sold 800K apple tv, since jan 2011
That’s a big claim to be making off three months of data. The mobile android ecosystem was at similar point a few months after launch (http://bit.ly/sOhkoL), and there’s only about 1M Google TV devices in market.
Over 85% of Netflix Streaming users stream to their TV through an app – that’s over 18M users in the US alone that are using apps on their TV – a significant number by an measure.
I think the lesson here is that consumers want great experiences on their TV (eg: movies on Netflix, TV shows on Hulu, discovery on Redux), and in order to grow in the space you need a strong multi-platform strategy. Netflix is live on over 800 devices, and to achieve similar levels of scale, media companies will need to be able to scale incredible discovery and consumption experiences consistently across hundreds of devices.
@DM. Is there any data anywhere that shows the 1MM google TV devices. Revue I thought was the biggest, ahead of the sony google TV product and tv’s, but it failed miserably. I wouldn’t put that number above 200K tops.
I would say this whole report is suspect, but what it does clearly show, is that beyond those apps that are preinstalled (which I wouldn’t even count) everything else drops off by a factor of 10x and is in the range of people probably barely touching them.
I would also question why Netflix isn’t even on there when its on the home menu by default.
@tivoboy – The data shows roughly 1M preinstalls for some of the apps, so there are at least 1M devices sold (and likely more than that as some percentage of people won’t use the internet functionality of their TV)
@david, the point I was trying to make ABOVE is that these number ABOVE don’t jibe with the reported numbers for sales of REVUE and sony google Tv. The Revue numbers are closer to a1/10th of that and they are the ones that put out all the advertising budget for it as the launch partner. My question ABOVE was that since these number don’t jibe at all with the retail sales of the google TV UNITS, could these number be reporting false data from some type of android tablet install, or dev environment, of the SDK install or something else?