Some Slightly Better News on Google TV
By Harry McCracken | Sunday, July 31, 2011 at 10:39 am
Last week, there was much discussion on the Web of one specific tidbit from Logitech’s dismal first-quarter financial results: more of the company’s Revue Google TV boxes were returned to Logitech than got sold.
Logitech has issued a press alert with a few notes:
- The Revue price reduction to $99–it was originally $249–goes into effect today.
- “Google TV 2” is “expected” to come out this Summer. (Google hasn’t said much at all about it so far–the platform was barely mentioned in the keynotes at May’s Google IO conference.)
- Logitech wants to be sure that people understand that the Revue’s “negative sales” didn’t mean that more consumers were returning the boxes that buying them. Consumer returns, the company says, were comparable to those of other products. “Negative sales” means that more distributors and retailers were returning unsold units than buying additional ones. (In other words, it wasn’t that people have been trying and disliking Google TV–they haven’t been interested enough in the idea to buy it, period.)
I still think that the concept of Google TV has promise. But at this point, its future is entirely dependent on version 2 being more usable and less buggy than the original, with more big-name content that doesn’t get blocked by the big media companies that own it. And if version 2 turns out to be a disappointment, I suspect that Google TV will end up not being one of the arrows that Google chooses to put wood behind.
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July 31st, 2011 at 11:14 am
Wait, you didn’t actually believe that this was about consumer returns, did you? For 9 out of 10 people, if they truly dislike something they just bought, they’ll put in the closet and prefer to never think about it again.
July 31st, 2011 at 8:26 pm
Naw, I didn't think it was consumers–but Logitech's clarification suggests that some people did.
–Harry
July 31st, 2011 at 10:05 pm
Actually I think most people's first thought went something like this,
"Wait a minute, are people returning fake models? How can there be more returns than sales."
Then the brain kicked in and it made sense.
August 1st, 2011 at 7:12 am
""Wait a minute, are people returning fake models? How can there be more returns than sales." "
They reported sales over multiple quarters, so they are talking about 2 different sales periods (like Q1 versus Q2). Returns over Q2 can incorporate the items sold in Q1. In other words, even though they sold X units in Q2, the quantity sold is less than what they did in Q1.
At least that's how it makes sense.
August 11th, 2011 at 1:25 am
I'm still waiting to get up the nerve to buy one. The money I had set aside for it I used to buy a 4 core HP PC to upgrade my dual core HP system. And I upgraded from Win XP to Win 7. And the price was $200 less
October 3rd, 2011 at 7:51 am
From what I've seen, and being a Dish TV subscriber, and Dish being a partner. They kind of seemed to push it out the door before it's expected due date of birth making it a almost pre-born child. It was like others were going to have similar babies or have delivered their child. And in most cases it was a free natural birth. Since this child was a preme baby it was not free. As for dish users if it came with the HD tuner for free that would have been great and smiled upon with the process of having a new child.
Plus the economy being so negative lately does not help. I've been saving for one for x-mas at full price but the savings account keeps getting diverted to other pressing things. But it is nice the price is around one third the full original price.
Other features I'd like to be developed for the future is I have a 8Terrabtye RAID array with four 2Terra hard drives, so if you could plug in a E-SATA drive of any size that would be great. Or even plug in a USB 3Terra hard disk and they'd develop a multi USB in one usb out switch you could have the sorage be set in switchable banks of storage. A drive could get devoted to each child for their shows or movies, and you could create drive folders like storage for topics like Action, Romance, drama movies, or even a drive for a show I like which is Star Trek there is 536 episodes plus the movies.
For most a single One Terrabyte drive is plenty enough, for me I use to have walls of VHS tapes that are now DVDs, and one day may all become video streams from hard disk storage. The only thing is 3500+ DVD's mostly from Dish shows at 720×480 and now 1920×1080 takes much space even full HD down scaled to SD size for DVD storage takes a lot of space. Just glad they are not still S-VHS or my 2 car garage would be a video tape room. Now it is just one wall and soon to become two.
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January 27th, 2012 at 4:19 am
Thanks for this informative article. I did not know about Google TV! Sounds promising. I like the fact that Google are not afraid to try out new things, but of course we will have to see if they actually go for it, in the end. cake poker review
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