Google’s Eric Schmidt On The Future Of TV

Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, was the keynote speaker at the 2011 Edinburgh Internative Television Festival in the UK, delivering the annual MacTaggart lecture. This article from The Guardian examines the impact of his speech and what the television industry thought about it. They describe his lecture as carefully crafted and say it was designed to boost Google’s intellectual credibility while giving depth to the debate around technology firms’ role in the media industry’s future. One point Schmidt tried to make to TV executives was that Google hadn’t stolen the market share from broadcasters:

The question we see over and over again is how the internet has displaced some existing and fixed revenue stream, but that’s not how the world works. You build new businesses. The majority of advertising money Google is getting is new money created from new customers of one kind or another … growth is the solution to nearly all societal problems. Television viewership is declining gracefully and that’s bad for all for us. Let’s reverse that, let’s grow it.

Google Crashes TV’s Edinburgh Party