Google TV Ventures Where Apple TV Dares Not: Porn

Adult entertainment channel Vivid announced that it would bring its steamy content to Google TV players to the living room, which was recently updated to the same Android Honeycomb platform that’s found on today’s latest Android tablets. While Apple tries to maintain a cleaner image, often times restricting adult content from appearing on its mobile App Store, Google has taken a more open approach.

“Vivid for Google TV gives our fans a new way to enjoy Vivid movies in high quality HD and with other benefits that provide a very appealing, highly enjoyable, and user friendly experience,” said Steven Hirsch, co-founder and co-chairman of Vivid. “It is a central part of our making Vivid available everywhere concept, which gives fans unified access to our content through their personal computers, mobile devices, tablets, television sets and DVD players.”

With Vivid’s hitting Google TV and potentially expanding to the rest of the Android ecosystem as a whole in the future, it begs the question if Google and the industry need to pull together to create a content rating system. So far, there are separate rating systems, in the U.S. at least, for a variety of content including music, movies, TV shows, and games. Magazines and books typically aren’t rated typically, though there are some pornographic magazine titles on the market. With platforms trying to merge all these various content and content sources together on a unified platform or even a single device, it may make more sense for the sake of simplicity to have a single content rating system that clearly delineates what parents may deem suitable for their children’s consumption.

Google had envisioned Google TV as a platform where users could surf the web, watch Internet content, and also view TV content side by side. The platform is another way that Google hopes to target ads to users and to expand the Android platform. To date, Google TV has not taken off as quickly as Google would have liked.