So Eric Schmidt recently gave an interview at LeWeb 2011. In the middle of a conversation mostly about world governments and democracy, he dropped a bomb about the future of Google TV.

by the summer of 2012 .... the majority of the televisions that you see in the television stores here will have Google TV embedded in it

You read that right, Eric Schmidt expects Google TV to somehow end up on 50%+ of televisions sold in the next 6 months. Google TV is probably hovering around 0% of televisions sold today.

There were almost no details given on just how he expects Google to accomplish this, he only mentioned "a similar strategy to what we did with Android, the price is free." That's great and all, but Google TV isn't "free" to the consumer, you need a beefier CPU, memory, and storage to run the OS, all of which increase the price of the TV.

Something to keep in mind, Schmidt has had several high profile cases of foot in mouth disease. So the other possibility is that this is just another "oops" moment from him. And really, the more you look at it, the more farfetched this statement becomes. If you take a look at TV market share, you can see just how crazy of a statement this is. You'd need Samsung (21.4%), Sony (14.2%), LG (12.7%), and Panasonic (9.1%) to go "all in" with GTV in order to crack "the majority" of televisions. Considering Google TV ships in about 0% of televisions currently, I think this is just another "misstatement" by Schmidt.

But who knows, maybe Google has a massive GTV push coming, with 4+ major manufacturers on board, (even though their last partner ran away screaming) who plan to commit 100% to this fledgling OS. Maybe Google TV actually will go from 0% to 50%+ in 7 months, making it one of quickest product turnarounds ever. Eric Schmidt must know what he's talking about... right?