Schmidt makes Google case again to “dumb TV” broadcasters

Speaking at O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco yesterday, Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt appears to have done little to douse the fires he started by referring to “dumb TV.”

Schmidt attributed the dumb TV quote to a broadcast executive initially – “do you realise you’re taking a dumb television and making it smart?”

“Yes, we’re guilty of that”, said Schmidt, who has also recently said that Google TV will “ruin your evening”.

“The way to get more revenues is to create more revenue sources, and the way to do that is through things like Google TV,” he said, before drawing analogies with the music industry and Apple. “We don’t want to repeat where revenue goes to zero.”

Google TV has so far failed to agree deals with any of the major US networks, and its forthcoming TV launch is certainly stirring intense emotions in the States. Take these two examples from Scott Cleland’s extensive blog (Cleland is a long-standing analyst for Fortune 500 companies):

“Programmers have long seen value creation in creating, aggregating, and advertising great content around brands and group appeals, while Google sees value creation in treating all the world’s information as a free commodity, where value is harvested only when individuals discover the info via Google search, and act upon it with a click, and only when Google mashes-up the free content with new Google product/service features.”

“Why is Google TV already a de facto monopoly platform or “monocaster”? Do the following math:

• Add Google’s world dominant search and search advertising platform, (which is the functional TV equivalent of a remote control and TV Guide for Internet video all in one;)
• To Google’s world dominant Internet audience, about 620 million users daily and a billion users weekly;
• To Google’s world dominant network of advertisers and publishers;
• To YouTube’s world dominant software and Internet videocasting infrastructure;
• To DoubleClick’s world dominant ad-serving software, display analytics, and Neilsen-like tracking and viewing measurement;
• To Admob’s world dominant mobile in-app ad-serving software;
• To Google’s free Android operating system, the world’s fastest growing mobile operating system; and
• It equals the world’s dominant monocaster with:
• 80% of the Internet video viewing audience;
• 2 billion daily Internet video views;
• 2 billion weekly monetized Internet video views;
• 160 million mobile daily Internet streamed views;
• 45 billion ads served daily; and
• 94 of the top 100 Ad Age advertisers as clients.
• Simply, no one else in the Internet video business, is in the same competitive solar system with this nascent Google TV monopoly.”