That’s my prediction… guess, whatever you wanna call it. I’m no analyst and, hell, I don’t claim to be the first person to have come up with this WAG. I’m just a dude. But, while thinking about it during my ‘lil stroll to pick up some smokes it seems to make sense and fit their plan for global, information domination…
Google is going to buy Tivo.

Here’s the backstory:

Yesterday I was given a golden ticket to sign up for GrandCentral. Having an account at GrandCentral is pretty much like having your own, personal call screener & message taker. Its a great service. They give you a new phone number, people call that number and the GrandCentral service gives you a bunch of control over who, when and how people can call you. Here’s their feature list.

Anyways… GrandCentral was purchased by Google around June giving them yet another means to acquire and classify information about you.

Google wants to know everything about you. Everything! As stated on their site:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

from: Google’s Company Overview

OK - let me ramble off a few more things before I bust out my “Google’s going to buy Tivo” reasoning.

With their corporate mission in mind lets take a look at some of their services and see what info your usage of their offerings provides The Big G:

• Google Search
  This one is obvious right? They know what you’re looking for. By clicking on the links in their search results they know what sites you’re visiting and when. We see this manifest now if you’re logged into a Google account while searching. If you click on some results, come back to Google & redo the exact same search you’ll see your “last visited” time next to each result’s title in light grey font.
• Google Ads
  Same kind of thing here. You click on an ad and they know it. But now they have extra reach b/c Google’s ads reside on tons of sites.
• Google Checkout
  They know what you’re buying.
• GMail
  GMail gives them a ton of info about who you know & how well you know them. When I was at Spoke we had an Outlook plugin that would automatically populate your online address book and based on the frequency & length of your back and forth communication we’d score the strength of your relationship. Same thing is possible with GMail. They’re the mail client & server. They know who’s writing you, how often you write back, if you save their messages in a special folder, how long you take to write back etc. They also skim the emails and know what you’re talking (writing) about. By “knowing what you’re writing about” they can infer the type of relationship: casual, friend, business, famil etc.
• OpenSocial, Orkut & Google Talk (the IM thing)
  Again, this is obvious. This gives them a bunch of info about who you know and what you guys talk about.
• Google News, Shopping & Blog Search
  Pretty much like search except its a narrower vertical of info.
• Google Reader
  Same thing - but with RSS and “friends”. What are you reading? What are you sharing with friends (helps them know more about your friends’ interests) bla bla bla.
• Feedburner
  This one’s interesting. Ya, you can search Feedburner for stuff to read but a ton of people use it as a way to syndicate their site’s/blog’s RSS. This give the sydicater metrics around who’s subscribing to their blog and other nifty stuff to know. Well, Google knows this too. This gives them knowledge about how many people read your blog/site regularly. They probably know who these people are and based on your account’s email and/or just by scraping your site they know who you are too.
• Google Analytics
  This is similar to FeedBurner but even more rich with info. You get a free service and Google gets to know how popular your site is. Its a basic concept but the possibilities that information provides are pretty endless.
• Google Finance
  This site’s not the most popular in its space but if you use it (or the iGoogle widget) they can make inferences about your financial situation. Your portfolio doesn’t guarantee you own those stocks but its still chalk full of data they can use.
• Google Maps
  Based on GEOIP they have a good guess as to where you live. Their maps product can strengthen that algorithm and on top of that they know where you’re going. Some of the YellowPages like functionality there also helps them gather more info about you; ie they know you’re constantly looking for pizza places etc.
• Google Docs
  With these apps (word processing, spreadsheet & calendar) you could theoretically be handing them access to everything you used to do with MS Office. Now, most haven’t abandoned their desktop productivity tools for a web version but there’s huge potential there.
• GrandCentral
  They know who’s calling you. Also, based on the feature set they are in a position to infer quite a bit about your relationship with each person that dials you up.
• YouTube & Google Video
  They know what you’re watching.

I’m sure you get the point. I’m definitely not the first person to bring all this up. I’m sure a ton of people having been thinking about the information connection points of all the free Google products and the potentially insane applications of all this personal data.

But what’s this have to do with Tivo? We’ll besides YouTube and Google Video they don’t know what you’re watching. Television and the internet video stuff still have a disconnect. You can’t watch every Sopranos episode on YouTube - or Lost or 24 etc. You get the jist. Some networks are starting to put episodes online but those are usually on their own sites. That puts all the online-tv-watching data in multiple places.

Google could indeed (through analytics, search etc) start gathering this information. They could start talking to networks and try to ink some deals to get their content on their properties. iTunes’ store is an indicator here: Even for money - not every show from every network if available on the net. Another approach could be to develop some software/service that would enable these networks to host their episodes on their own sites and gather metrics through that. But, I highly doubt networks would be cool with this data just flowing away to a 3^rd party. This data’s probably not something they’d want Google to have.

So, if Google really wants to “organize the world’s information” they probably want to know what you’re watching and sitting right there in your living room with you would be a pretty sweet way to gather that data. They could license the OS out to other DVR providers & TV services too. This way they’d only have to ink deals with a handful of folks (cable, satellite providers etc) instead of 100’s of networks.

So, that’s my reasoning. I don’t think its too insane of an idea especially given that Tivo’s only trading at around $7.19 (sunday 1/13/08) and that this would do a pretty good job of rounding out The Big G’s information pool.