Google tries to reassure TV industry

Google has moved to reassure a global television industry quaking at the prospect that the Internet search giant is about to move onto TV sets and into living rooms around the globe.In a keynote speech to Europes leading broadcasting industry conference, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt acknowledged the companys immense scale built on search advertising -- a scale which almost everyone in the media industry fears as a threat to their existing businesses -- but said the nature of technology and the internet also made Google vulnerable.Online, competition is only ever a click away ... its common for once-leading services to become out-innovated and overtaken, Schmidt said in the annual MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival.Many of the broadcasting executives, producers and advertising industry leaders in the audience fear Googles entry into their territory with its Google TV internet-connected device, threatening the kind of dislocation it has triggered in online and print media with search advertising and the mobile phone business with its now leading Android operating system.Schmidt, whose company has been seen as arrogant and no respecter of copyright, struck a conciliatory tone, saying Google had moved to be more speedy in taking down content which breached copyright and would be more active in supporting the business models of content owners that wanted to charge for their content online.It had no intention to move into content creation, believing its core skills remained in technology and in focusing on three trends: Mobile, local and social.Google TV would be launched in Europe early in 2012, he said.