Money Watch – Personal Finance Blog

You may soon be able to do things like internet banking, budgeting and investing on your TV, thanks to Google.

Google introduced Google TV a few months ago, and they’ve now released a lot more detail about on the platform:

Google TV is a new way to think about TV: it’s a platform that combines your current TV programming and the open web into a single, seamless entertainment experience. One of our goals with Google TV is to finally open up the living room and enable new innovation from content creators, programmers, developers and advertisers. By bringing Google Chrome and access to the entire Internet, you can easily navigate to thousands of websites to watch your favorite web videos, play Flash games, view photos, read movie reviews or chat with friends—all on the big screen.

Browsing the web on the TV has been available for a while, but is yet to really reach the masses, due to hardware and software limitations. But now both Google and Apple appear to want to takeover TV screens, the changes are likely to come thick and fast.

Google are working with some big media companies to provide content for their platform, and crucially, they’re also going to allow developers to code apps for TV, just like you can download apps for your smartphone, which should really open up the possibilities of what you can do on; from online banking, to budgeting, insurance comparisons etc.

Here’s a video showing off some of the first apps:

Whilst there’s no indication when Google TV will be available in the UK, Google appears to be working with Sony and Logitech for the hardware to host their platform, and they’ve said to look out for announcements from their partners in the next few weeks.