How Google Will Use Your TV to Read Your Mind

This just in: Google plans to use the boob tube to control your brain.

According to an unconfirmed report from The Verge, Google is building a set-top box to compete with Apple TV, Roku, the newly announced Amazon Fire TV, and its own Chromecast dongle.

It’s called Android TV and, if real, it could alter the very fabric of the universe, create a rift in the space-time continuum, cause winged monkeys to fill the skies and peanut butter to no longer stick to the roof of your mouth.

(Thinkstock)

Or, alternately, it could help Google achieve what the world’s biggest tech companies have been trying to do for the past two decades: Predict what you’re going to do next, before even you know you’re going to do it.

At least, Android TV may predict what you’re likely to watch next. Per The Verge:

Remember, Google declined to confirm that report, and The Verge has offered zero evidence that these documents are authentic or reflect Google’s current plans for a television set-top.

But let’s assume that the documents are both real and current. After all, the description doesn’t sound much different from Amazon’s new Fire TV, which is based on a version of Android and “predicts the shows you’ll want to watch and gets them ready to stream instantly,” per Jeff Bezos, or at least some PR person pretending to be Jeff Bezos.

Sounds like the same deal, doesn’t it? Only there’s one key difference, and that is Google.

Mad men
This concept isn’t particularly new, by the way. Tech companies have been attempting to use data to predict your behavior for years. It’s called predictive analytics. And, of course, Madison Avenue had been trying to do it for decades before that, though it had less data to work with and much nicer suits.

One of the earliest commercial applications of predictive analytics was TiVo, which would record programs it thought you might want to see based on the ones you’d already watched. The predictions were often ludicrous, but you could fine-tune TiVo’s analysis of your psyche by pressing the thumbs-up or thumbs-down buttons on the remote for particular shows you liked or didn’t like.

Today, predictive analytics is a standard feature on most content services. Amazon, Netflix, Pandora, and others all have recommendation engines built into their products. The idea is that if they know what you bought, watched, or listened to in the past, they can predict what you will probably want to buy, watch, or listen to in the future. In 2009, Netflix famously offered a $1 million prize to anyone who could improve the performance of its recommendations engine by 10 percent. (A group of stat geeks calling themselves BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos won it, but just barely.)

But there are limits to what these services know about you. Amazon may know you buy a lot of novels by Irish crime writer Adrian McKinty, but it doesn’t know that your favorite beer is Smuttynose Imperial Stout. Netflix is intimately familiar with your obsession with John Hughes movies, but it isn’t aware that you have “Don’t You Forget About Me” set to repeat endlessly on your iPod. Pandora knows you love The Black Keys and hate The White Stripes, but it doesn’t have a clue about your collection of Lladro figurines in the shape of Zach Galifianakis.

Google, though, knows more about you than all of these services combined.

All your user base are belong to us
So let’s go a little further down the rabbit hole and assume that, if Google is indeed building an Android TV, it will certainly want you to enter your Gmail login to use it, just as it does with Android phones. If you live inside the Google universe, that would be the same username and password you use to access your email, calendar, G+ social network, photos and other files you’ve stored in the cloud, every search term you’ve used, and each website you’ve visited for the past nine months. If you have an Android phone (or Google Glass), that would probably also include a trove of location data.

In other words, Google will have a much larger reservoir of highly personal information it can use to make predictions about your behavior, which in turn could make those predictions more accurate.

Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. By mining that data, an Android TV might be able to introduce you to content you instantly love but might never have found. The magic of Google’s algorithms could lead you to some truly awesome stuff, so you no longer have to rely on your Facebook friends or Twitter peeps to be your media filters.

Or not. We’d have to see Android TV in action, and right now we don’t even know if it really exists. If Google does manage to achieve this, though, it may ultimately win the shootout between Roku, Apple, Amazon, and anyone else who wants to dive into the increasingly crowded streaming media/cord-cutting arena.

But let’s be clear about something: This is not really about introducing you to new worlds of content, making the planet a better place, or any of the other nice-sounding phrases that drop from the mouths of Silicon Valley billionaires. This is about predicting what you’re going to buy next. Because ultimately that’s what Google really cares about.

Adding your viewing choices to the rich stew of data that Google is cooking up about you makes it that much tastier, while opening up new revenue streams for the $50 billion advertising giant. And it will help bring one of the last bastions of passive advertising — TV commercials — fully into the highly trackable Internet age. Theoretically, at least, advertisers could know not only how many people are watching an ad, but who each of them are. And if they don’t know, Google certainly will.

This hasn’t happened yet, but it will. You might even say it’s predictable.

Questions, complaints, kudos? Email Dan Tynan at ModFamily1@yahoo.com.