ISP filter could put Google TV on backburner

GOOGLE won't rush into rolling out Google TV if it thinks an ISP filter will result in a poor service.

Google TV, coming to an unfiltered country near you / Supplied

AUSTRALIANS may be forced to wait for Google TV if the search giant thinks any proposed ISP filter will result in a poorer quality service.

Google TV was announced by the company at its annual I/O conference in San Francisco last week.

With it, Google plans to bring the internet into the loungeroom of every TV-owning household in the world, with an ambitious new service that lets people mesh television viewing with surfing the web.

Google TV can be accessed using upcoming web-enabled televisions from Sony or set-top boxes from Logitech that route web content to existing TV sets.

It will be rolled out in the US late this year, but the company is unwilling to say when - or even if - Australians will get the service.

Google Australia head of engineering Alan Noble said the main problem in Australia would be whether the quality of the service would make it worthwhile.

Currently that quality issue revolves around bandwidth, a problem which which would be solved by the NBN rollout, Mr Noble said.

But YouTube – which will play a major role in Google TV's success - presents a problem for the Government's proposed filtering plan because filtering it on a page-by-page basis could slow down internet speeds.

The only other option was for the Government to blacklist YouTube altogether.

Mr Noble said Google would be less inclined to roll out a poor quality service "unless people are willing to accept highly pixellated, degraded content. It's going to require multiple megabits per second.

"We do have technical concerns about filtering,” he said.

“There is potential to degrade performance. It will also impact not just IPTV but all kinds of web products and services."

"That may well be a consideration in how quickly it's deployed in Australia."

Mr Noble said the company "hadn't really considered" the impact of making the internet even more accessible, but hoped families and manufacturers alike would treat internet TV with the same scrutiny they treated Pay-TV.

"Our philosophy is that the information should be out there and available to as many people as possible."

"I can't say that all Google TV set-top boxes will have lockdown features but certainly there are opportunities for vendors to produce a child-safe set-top box."