14 DAY TRIAL // Despite of the fact that, back when Google TV was originally announced, Intel was one of the project's most important supporters, it seems that recent problems might have prompted the chip manufacturer to take a more conservative stance, putting some distance between itself and this initiative.
So, the people over at San Francisco Chronicle came across an ad for Intel's "Smart TV" initiative in the NYC Subway, which, despite providing some visual cues on the platform's functionality and some of the partners, said absolutely nothing about Google TV.
This is actually quite a curious thing, given the fact that, after all, Google is Intel's most important partner in the field of Internet-connected, Smart TVs.
Of course, this Google-less add might be just the work of an agency in charge of Intel's advertising account, not reflecting the company's official position on the matter, and this whole thing might be just a rumor created by the source mentioned above in order to stir up some attention.
However, there might be at least an ounce of truth to it, given the fact that after somewhat of a promising start (just about everyone was excited about it upon its initial announcement, and the same happened when Sony and Logitech revealed their first-ever Google TV products), the platform has pretty much taken a turn for the worse.
As we've reported earlier this week, Google has apparently forced all of the partners getting ready to launch Google TV hardware at CES 2011 (including Sharp, Toshiba, Visio, etc.) to cancel their plans indefinitely, only Korean company Samsung getting the green light (probably due to the advanced marketing plans they have in place).
This cancellation, apparently caused by some last-minute software-related issues, joins Google's already serious debacle related to content providers, who haven't really been quite keen on granting the search engine giant access to their collections, thus leaving us to wonder just what the future of this otherwise very interesting initiative really is.