Google TV Coming to the UK and Europe Early Next Year

Google TV is not getting much love these days, but it's still pretty much alive. Google is working on the so-called Google TV 2.0 and the platform is getting a reboot soon. In fact, Google is so confident in its TV platform that it plans on offering it in more places, expanding into Europe.

Speaking at the Edinburgh International TV Festival, where former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked to give the keynote MacTaggart Lecture, Google's chairman said that Google TV is definitely coming to the UK.

He said that devices with Google TV were going to be launched in Europe early next year, missing the holiday season.

However, the next-generation Google TV devices are probably going to show up in the US this fall, in time for the annual shopping spree in December.

Google TV was initially launched last fall, to a lot of hype, but the platform failed to impress.

It was buggy and clunky and the fact that TV networks started blocking it from accessing their websites didn't help.

Early adopters may have put up with the somewhat poor experience if there was great content to be had.

But Google TV failed to live up to its expectations as merging the web with TV content. Having video sites blocked left Google TV as something you could use to watch YouTube videos and little else.

But Google is redesigning the whole thing and there are higher hopes for the Google TV 2.0 platform, which is based on Android Honeycomb, the flavor of Android aimed at tablet devices.

Google expects the second launch to go better than the first, since it's already planning to expand to Europe. It remains to be seen if it manages to get as many hardware manufacturers to work with it as the first time though.