Google Is All Set To Display Live TV Listings in Searches

It’s 9 PM. You are in a posh hotel in London. You have a flight to catch, but it doesn’t leave until 10 AM the next day. You are bored, and you are missing that favorite TV show of yours. But you think that “it is the UK! How can I possibly know what TV shows are running here right now?” If you have ever faced this situation, or want to avoid such situations, Google has a way out for you. Read below to know more about this update.

Google is all set to display live TV listings in its searches. That’s right. No more long- winded searching through some website to know when your favorite show will air. You can simply search for the show in Google, and voila! you’ll get the timings.

On 20th April, representatives of Google attended a keynote at the “Closing General Session of the National Association of Broadcasters Show”. To quote Google, they “discussed the rebirth of TV and how we’re helping Broadcasters and Distributors with discovery, monetization and content creation.”

In their official blog, Google has announced that they will be expanding on their TV show search features to show TV show airtimes and channel information.

Google users will have the option to customize their search by utilizing the “edit provider” option while searching for TV shows.

Google’s TV info cards can also provide information about streaming or renting TV shows through popular apps like iTunes, Google Play, Netflix, Amazon Video etc. Though nothing has been revealed about how this will be achieved, we suspect Google will either take advantage of schema microformat, or use their “Featured snippet” result, to display the information.

But wait! There’s more!

Google has also announced that they will include personalized TV ads using DoubleClick’s Dynamic Ad Insertion. This will allow TV viewers to view ads that they’re interested in. No more, no less. The ads will be hyper-personalized and tailored to the interests of individual viewers. Which means, if you like sports cars, you’ll no longer be viewing ads about pickup trucks, but a brand new car that Ferrari is about to launch.

And this is just the beginning. Ad breaks will also get smarter, which means, two ads that share similar themes will not appear on the same break. Two ads about cars will not be displayed in the same commercial. Rules can also be set by DoubleClick for Publisher clients so that an Ad about adult products does not appear in an ad break that had an ad about children’s toys.

More Content, Better Content

Professional animators and designers swear by the 3D animation and modeling software, Autodesk. For years now, Autodesk has been used by professionals to create visual effects for movies. Google has now collaborated with Autodesk to bring the same technology to cloud-based rendering solution called Maya® for Google Platform ZYNC Render.

This will allow professionals to create TV and movie content and rendering jobs on cloud without any hitch, no matter how large they are.

Our Conclusion

Many would wonder why Google is taking interest on television channels and programs. We would like to remind them that Google has never been afraid to try new things. Google car, Google Glass, Artificial Intelligence, Google Fiber; Google and its massive R&D projects have revolutionized the internet, and to an extent, public life, in many ways. A foray into television and movies thus shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Though Google’s inclusion of Ads in television networks might seem a bit strange, Google did try something similar a few years ago in 2008, when it introduced the TV advertisement platform and discontinued it in 2012. The reason why Google took this step seemed very logical. To quote Google, “video is increasingly going digital and users are now watching across numerous devices. So we’ve made the hard decision to close our TV Ads product over the next few months and move the team to other areas at Google. We’ll be doubling down on video solutions for our clients (like YouTube, AdWords for Video, and ad serving tools for web video publishers).” Before that though, the ads had quite the reach, as can be seen in the graph below:

Google had also launched its TV platform in 2010, with an integrated Android operating system intended to be used as a smart TV system. Though the system was upgraded to Android TV in 2012, the whole project was discontinued in 2014.

Who benefits from this? You or Me?

From an SEO point-of-view, we think this move by Google will prove to be beneficial for brands which depend on digital Ad revenue. Brands which displayed ads on Google Search, will now have the option of displaying custom tailored advertisements and commercials on television as well. Clients of DoubleClick for Publisher will have the option to set definite rules which would enable them to deliver ads that would be more relevant to the needs of their customers and viewers. To learn more about how this would work, you can check the video above and this link.

Though Google has not specified when they are going to launch all these features, a representative said that the features would be launched “soon”.

We will keep you updated on this topic as the situation unfolds.