In a blog post today Google offered a peak into the near future of Google TV. They listed some of the partners they’re working with for the next generation of Google TV products, some returning and some new.
- LG – We’re thrilled to welcome global consumer electronics leader LG to the Google TV family. LG will showcase a new line of TVs powered by Google TV running on their own L9 chipset at CES.
- Marvell – Also new to the Google TV family this year is Marvell, an innovative worldwide leader in chipsets. Marvell will be showcasing a new generation of Google TV solutions which will help bring more products across more price points to consumers.
- MediaTek – We’re also excited to partner with MediaTek, the leading Taiwanese chipset designer. MediaTek chipsets will power yet another wave of Google TV devices.
- Samsung – We’re excited to work closely with Samsung to bring Google-TV powered Samsung devices to market in 2012.
- Sony – We’re happy to build on our partnership with Sony. At CES, Sony will unveil new devices for the US and plans to offer Google TV powered products in several countries around the world in 2012.
- Vizio – Last year we announced our partnership with Vizio at CES. This year we’re excited to join Vizio as they hold private demos at CES showcasing their new line of Google TV-powered products.
The shift to ARM based processors has been widely anticipated, though the specific partnerships with Marvell and MediaTek is new info. It is a little surprising as you might expect well known chip vendors from the mobile industry, such as NVIDIA, Texas Instruments, and Samsung, to be involved but perhaps Google feels the requirements for Google TV are different enough from mobile Android systems that alternate chip designs are better.
Sony is the only vendor who brought first generation products to market to return to this list. Samsung and Vizio both talked about Google TV at the last CES, but held off on shipping products. Which was probably for the best, given the multitude of issues with Google TV 1.0. Now that Google TV 2.0 is out, and is vastly improved over its predecessor, it is much more viable as a connected TV platform. With the addition of LG, if all four vendors really execute on Google TV in their new models, we may well see Google make good on their bold claims of Google TV being in the majority of new TVs this year.
Via the Google TV Blog.
Edit: I see in my YouTube feeds that they’ve also posted a video preview of what’s to come: