In what could go down as the deal of the decade, Google is to buy Motorola Mobility. While more likely to be about phones than set-tops, Julian Clover looks at what the transaction means to TV land.
The reasons as to why Google chose to spend its millions on Motorola Mobility probably depends on where you sit. For some it is all about the patents, like time, they’re just not making them anymore.
Google is now much more than a search engine, Google+ has been so favourably received that Google Buzz now feels like a dim distant memory, and then there is Google TV.
Remember that? It was supposed to be the technology that changed TV forever. But when even Google executives admit they didn’t quite get it right you know that it is a business plan in need of revision.
But Motorola didn’t always get it right either. Only now is the company re-entering the European cable market. Motorola had previously purchased the Swedish Kreatel, which at a stroke put it into the IPTV business, and in March picked up its near neighbour in UI specialist Dreampark.
Google it must be remembered has said it will allow Motorola to be run as it is today, separate from the main business.
The IPTV business that Motorola has been separately exploiting is a different one to the one that Google TV was trying to enter. Google TV was all about over-the-top, though there are enough synergies for the two to come together or even cross over, should that be what Google decide to do.
Microsoft must still serve as a cautionary lesson to technology providers from the PC world that wish to cross the threshold and enter TV land. Even now Mediaroom cannot said to have made it, perhaps that is in part a reflection of the IPTV star itself waning.
The flavour of the month is rightly multiscreen delivery, TV on the go, and Motorola was an early mover here. An early mover with Google Android as well; indeed if you look around a Motorola stand you would be hard-pressed to find an Apple product. No wonder Google liked Motorola.
The connection between set-top division and companion devices had been well thought through – and a bonus for Motorola to be able to develop the technologies side by side. It is an anomoaly of Virgin Media’s TiVo offer that while the connected PVR boasts an iPad app, this is one of the few popular communications devices you can’t buy from Virgin’s mobile shops, with no Apple contract it’s Android.
The public will decide in time as to whether they want to be Android or iPad friendly. But remember it was the closed system put forward by Motorola, or to be precise its predecessor General Instrument, which contributed to its difficulties in the late 1990s.