It’s time to start thinking about optimizing your website for Google TV. With the launch of Google TV , people can access your website right from their television sets. Google TV has a fully functioning web browser built in, users can easily visit your site from their TV. Current sites should already work, but you may want to provide your users with an enhanced TV experience — what’s called the “10-foot UI” (user interface). They’ll be several feet away from the screen, not several inches away, and rather than a mouse on their desktop, they’ll have a remote with a keyboard and a pointing device.
There is an entire Google TV site optimization guide here and a checklist here. Google TV Optimization guide is divided into four main sections
- A design guide that provides various user experience (UX) concepts that are relevant to the 10-foot UI and that work well in the Google TV Environment.
- An implementation guide that provides HTML, CSS, and JavaScript samples as well as other technical tips on optimizing your site for Google TV.
- Guidelines for optimizing performance of Adobe Flash on your site.
- A checklist of optimization tasks to track your progress
Google TV required you to use Google account, as Danny Sullivan points out in his review of the new Sony Google TV-ready Blu-Ray Player. Interestingly, it also asks users if they want to send usage stats to Google (this is aggregate data used for detecting bugs, according to the company, which also says it doesn’t collect any viewing history. According to Sullivan, Google still has a lot of work to do with search on Google TV.
