Microsoft Xbox One vs Google TV: Who Owns The Living Room?

For the last several decades your living room has largely been controlled by one powerful force: your cable (or satellite) company. This is slowly changing as companies like Apple, Roku and Google work to steal some of the spotlight.

It's true that Google TV has had mixed success so far, but there is a ton of untapped potential for theGoogle TV platform. Will Google ever reach it? That's hard to say, but the pressure is certainly on now more than ever, especially with Microsoft's announcement yesterday of the Xbox One.

The Xbox One might be a game console, but Microsoft is clearly pushing multimedia and TV integration with its next-gen console in its own major play for the living room. As you'd expect, this draws quick comparison between the Xbox One and devices like Google TV.

The Xbox One takes a familiar idea and expands on it

Like Google TV devices, the Xbox One doesn't actually replace a cable box. Instead, you hook your Xbox One up through HDMI and the signal is sent from the cable box over to Microsoft's console.

So how does Xbox One handle TV differently? The biggest difference is that in right conditions you can control your TV content by using extremely polished voice commands. Instead of grabbing the remote, you simply say “Watch MTV” and it will switch to MTV, there are also hand gestures using Kinect's camera. As an added bonus, the Xbox One is extremely fast at switching between Live TV and other Xbox One content.

Xbox One also has sleek multi-tasking abilities, making it easy to snap an app on one side of the screen and watch TV on the other 2/3 of the display. This is particularly useful if you are watching a show and want to look up something about it on the net.

That said, Xbox One's great TV communication setup is a bit of an illusion. Why's that? Because it only works perfectly like this under the right conditions. Not all cable providers will partner with Microsoft to make everything work, and not all cable boxes allow channel changing through HDMI. That means that for many users, you will still need to grab the cable box remote to change channels and get things done.