Wednesday, October 20, 2010 at 9:51 PM
Webmaster Level: AllJust as mobile phones make your site accessible to people on the go, Google TV makes your site easily viewable to people lounging on their couch. Google TV is a platform that combines your current TV programming with the web and, before long, more apps. It’s the web you love, with the TV you love, all available on the sofa made for you. Woohoo!
Because Google TV has a fully functioning web browser built in, users can easily visit your site from their TV. Current sites should already work, but you may want to provide your users with an enhanced TV experience -- what's called the “10-foot UI” (user interface). They'll be several feet away from the screen, not several inches away, and rather than a mouse on their desktop, they'll have a remote with a keyboard and a pointing device.
For example, here’s YouTube for desktop users versus what we’re calling “YouTube Leanback” -- our site optimized for large screens:
YouTube desktop version on the left, YouTube Leanback on the right
See our Spotlight Gallery for more examples of TV-optimized sites.
What does "optimized for TV" mean?
It means that, for the user sitting on their couch, your site on their TV is an even more enjoyable experience:
- Text is large enough to be viewable from the sofa-to-TV distance.
- Site navigation can be performed through button arrows on the remote (a D-pad), rather than mouse/touchpad usage
- Selectable elements provide a visual queue when selected (when you’re 10 feet away, it needs to be really, really obvious what selections are highlighted)
- and more...
First, remember that appearance alone doesn't incorporate whether your site can be easily navigated by TV users (i.e. users with a remote rather than a mouse). With that said, here’s a quick workaround to give you a ballpark idea of how your site looks on TV. (For more in-depth info, please see the “Design considerations” in our optimization guide.)
- On a large monitor, make your window size 1920 x 1080.
- In a browser, visit your site at full screen.
- Zoom the browser to 1.5x the normal size. This is performed in different ways with different keyboards. For example, in Chrome if you press ctrl+ (press ctrl and + at the same time) twice, that’ll zoom the browser to nearly 1.5x the initial size.
- Move back 3 x (the distance between you and the monitor).
- Check out your site!
How can you learn more?
Our team just published a developer site, with TV optimization techniques, at code.google.com/tv/web/.
20 comments:
I was wondering about the next step of the online experience, and this is certainly interesting - I wonder how pervasive it will be in the end? Not the first attempt at net/TV integration. But it seems neat, and being backed by Google can't hurt.
Great thing. Thank you.
- CSS for 'tv' media types been around for a while - will Google TV support this ?
That's why Google is on top....
Thanks Google
Fantastic, love the new media keys player, will this new interface be integrated into blogspot based blogs, for example, in a customizable gadget or available as an embed player?
great service
It's getting better and better. I just hope the quality of videos uploaded are also improved to match the services.
This is great news & love what you did with Youtube Leanback! Thanks Maile, I will be looking at how to implement this on my sites with videos.
Not quite accustomed to optimize your site for viewing on TV, but the new format of TV shows that need and analysis tools are needed.
I'm trying to create a separate version of my site for Google TV but need the user agent to identify when it's visiting. What is the Google TV user agent?
@Gerry: Google TV uses a Chrome browser, so anything Chrome supports, Google TV supports.
@Joana Morais: That's a great idea for simplifying TV optimization. I've made a note. Would also be great if the developer community could share such a solution -- there's tons of potential for usage by the Blogger, Wordpress, etc., audience. Exciting stuff.
@Joe: Thanks for asking. The user-agent is listed in our implementation guide.
When will the rest of us "amateur hour" content producers be given access to the API and leanback flash player being used by sites like youtube.com and adultswim.com?
great info, thanks for sharing
Google TV will changes the online gaming world experience for sure :)
I think we should hav a "tv" somewhere in the url to distinguish our "tv" web.
Ie.
Tv.mywebsite.com
mywebsite.com/tv
mywebsite.tv
:)
This is one of the best way we can improve our SEO strategy again to our clients in relation to media or TV shows. Thank you for this wonderful opportunity.
yeah.. Thanks google...
I'm really impressed with YouTube Leanback as well as the simplicity of optimizing for TV.
Thanks for the post!
Only Google can come up with great solutions such as this. Thank you for making the Internet a fun place to be. The part of search engine optimization where I can do a lot of coding is what I enjoy the most.
Will adding one CSS for larger font size and spacing be enough to optimize a site for Google TV?
Hi everyone,
Since over a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Central Help Forum.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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