Last week, representatives of 20 hardware makers came together in Google’s Seoul, South Korea office to talk about the future of Google TV, I’ve learned from a person with knowledge of the gathering. During two days of workshops, the companies were told about upcoming Google TV technologies and also talked about future devices powered by Google TV.
I’ve also learned a bit about who was part of this meeting: Unsurprisingly, the list of attendees included representatives from device makers like LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL, as well as chipset manufacturers such as Marvell and MediaTek.
But at least two of the participating companies weren’t previously announced as Google TV partners: Nemustech is a South Korean software systems integrator that also develops launchers and UX frameworks for Android mobile phones, and Wistron is a Taiwanese original design manufacturer that builds TV sets for Sony and others.
Some of these partners have already started to work with the next generation of the Google TV software, which received its last significant update last fall. That makes it likely that we will see another big Google TV update before the end of the year.
It’s unclear yet how that next generation of Google TV will look like. Vizio CTO Matt McRae told GigaOM in January that at least some future Google TV devices could ditch the HDMI pass-through of live TV signals and instead look much more like competing devices from Roku and Apple TV with a clear focus on online streaming apps.
Check out my interview with Matt McRae below:
Watch this video for free on GigaOM
Image courtesy of Flickr user SLR Jester.
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