Google TV...Is this the next best thing to happen to TV

Google has launched "smart" TV, a service that merges surfing on the Internet with surfing TV channels. The technology company has joined forces with Sony, Intel and Logitech International. Google wants to turn televisions into giant monitors for Internet browsing so it can make more money selling ads (todayonline.com).

Google has built a consortium of key partners, i.e. Best Buy, Logitech, DISH network, Adobe, and Intel to take this concept of the Web to TV a reality, and as per DISH web site, the service with Google integration is slated this fall in the US.

The Logitech Set Top Box receiver presumably having a high degree of influence from Intel ATOM processors, Adobe and the Android OS in the way that the content is presented in an admixture of TV and Web, and further, the google search engine technology giving an interface to search and correlate content of the TV and Web, the question of how Open..Is Open? comes into mind. Where as Apples has been driven by the notion of One device (iphone,ipad), One technology (AMD,xcode,Objective-C), and one Appstore (for third party development)...Google is driven by a philosophy of opening the O/S, and API/SDK centric development environment for third party app developers. Obviously leveraging some of their own core products, such as you-tube, Google Maps, G-Mail and G-Talk etc.

From a TV perspective, how open is this ? In light of the above development the following points in my view is really relevant

(1) How open is this platform, to embrace many other STB and OEM manufacturers (where some of them may be non INTEL based) eg. Ant,Microsoft which are widely used.

(2) Can the search technology be extended at the point of content ingestion. Eg. what your Friends in FB thought about a scene in an on demand movie. Replying your comment back to your wall about the VoD.

(3) How will this influence standards such as IMS, OpenIPTVforum which are founded on voice,video and internet convergence.

(4) Can search be integrated to the MPEG4 meta-data layer.

These are few of the points which lurk in my mind...is this the next best thing to happen to TV...your guess is as good as mine.