Be Cool, Google Negotiating with NBC, CBS, ABC

As we reported yesterday, other people were reporting that the three biggest television networks have snubbed Google from enabling their Google TV viewers to watch the three networks’ video streams from their websites as anyone could otherwise do with a computer. A big blow to Google TV and its launch, and an odd one as the networks would still have people viewing their websites and whatever they do on those websites to promote programming or advertise. Sounded like a shakedown to me, one that would result in a table somewhere with execs from each of the four companies joining each other to figure out how many millions of Google’s dollars is a satisfactorily large amount of extortion money to take home.

Or maybe Google could play some hardball and coming out swinging, bad cop exec first threatening to drag the sons of bitches by their asses to the FCC and the FTC and the DoJ yelling about anti-competitiveness or whatever, then the good Google exec cop comes in and says Hey fellas sorry about that, he gets hotheaded sometimes… how about this, you turn the switch back on and we won’t advertise ever on top of your content and will go out of our way to make sure your promotional material on your site is very visible to our customers? We’ll even give you a strategy on saving face. Yeah? Okay great, get the notary women to stamp this and let’s get out of here.

Well hey, good news, Reuters is reporting that something along those lines is going down and I don’t see anyone at such a table running into an impasse when everyone could walk out with some sort of win. This is older news but I was delighted to find out that HBO is teaming up with Google for what sounds like an on-demand service for HBO subscribers (that’s me) and their Google TVs. Nice.

Doug Simmons