Google’s Latest App Connects PCs To TVs
“Google has moved into your living room, although it is not yet apparent whether it is just wandering through or whether it will grab some popcorn, set down on the couch and stay for a while.”
Google recently disclosed its new “Google Media Server,” a Windows based application with a new feature that empowers you to play YouTube videos, Picasa albums, and multimedia content from your computer on any device with Universal Plug-and-Play…
The Media Server, which only functions on Windows machines, requires the user to install Google Desktop applications on the PC. The server uses the technology for its administration tool and leverages Desktop Search to locate media files on the PC and on the Web, where the most popular video site is Google-owned YouTube.
It can send video, audio and photos to any other device on your home network that uses a standard called Universal Plug and Play — most significantly, Sony’s PlayStation 3 game console. It also works with some televisions made by Hewlett-Packard and a handful of other geeky devices.
“Google Media Server is a Windows application that aims to bridge the gap between Google and your TV,” the search engine said in a Thursday posting on the company blog.
Google’s intends to include serious video advertising projects; Eric Schmidt, company CEO, said earlier this month that Google plans to make some money out of YouTube, but has not yet figured out how to do so. YouTube was purchased by Google for a whopping $1.6 billion, but up to this point, the investment has not generated any profits. Meanwhile, the site has proven to eat out most of Google’s outgoing bandwidth.
In releasing the software, Google moves closer to an area of the home entertainment market coveted by Microsoft and Apple. Both companies have software within their respective operating systems for connecting a Windows Vista PC and Mac, respectively, to a TV.
Microsoft for quite a while has offered Windows software that turns a PC into a set-top box for delivering cable programming and recording video. Apple is connecting the Mac or PC with the home TV through its Apple TV hardware. Analysts expect home networking, which is the ability for multiple devices in the home to share content, to be a lucrative market in the future.
With the new Google Media Server, the PC-TV gap was bridged and with the help of YouTube’s huge popularity, online videos will surely find themselves played on TVs everywhere in no time.