Kansas City must be feeling like the prettiest girl at the Google Pageant these days. First the city gets chosen as the starting location for Google Fiber, the company’s project to broaden access to and increase the speed of the internet, and now it looks as if the largest city in Missouri may get to be the first place to try on some kind of TV service offered by Google.
The Kansas City Star reports that Google Fiber submitted the necessary applications to operate a video service in Missouri and Kansas, which strongly suggests the city will be getting some kind of television service related to or provided by Google. As ever, Google was doing its best to downplay the excitement. “We’re still exploring what products will be available when we launch Google Fiber,” Google spokeswoman Jenna Wandres said in an email to the Star.
Giving Kansas City a streaming internet service that moves at the speed of one gigabyte per second would be a great way to explore those options, as I’m sure the citizens of Kansas City will agree.
The application submitted by Google reveals a little more info – at least enough to sugar-coat those already sweet fantasies of video-streaming bliss.
In the Kansas application, Google said it “will utilize national and regional video headend facilities” – essentially programming collection points – “to send IPTV” – a television-over-Internet technology like that used in AT&T’s Uverse service – “across a private (Internet protocol) network to subscribers.”
Keep in mind this is all speculative reporting at the moment, but… if it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck, right?
