At its developers’ conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Google unveiled its ‘Google TV’ initiative – a new television platform that will bring, along with the traditional broadcast, the accessibility to online content as well as and cable shows.

According to the company, Google TV – which will become functional by the holiday season this year - integrates the television with the Web; thereby attempting to bring some kind of an order to the apparent mayhem that the countless programming choices have resulted in.

Specifically speaking, Google TV essentially comprises an on-screen search box, quite similar to the one on the popular Google Web search site. Users can, via the TV search box, access Google’s search engine to glance through live programs, DVR recordings and the Web. The search box delivers a comparatively brief list of results that can be accessed with a push of a button.

Noting that Google TV holds the potential to “change the future of television,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt acknowledged that it was “much harder to marry a 50-year-old technology and a brand new technology than those of us in the brand new technology industry thought.”

The Google TV platform was applauded not only by the developers in attendance at the conference, but also by a number of tech industry bigwigs, including Intel and Sony Corp, that had sent their chief executives to announce their association with Google’s new project.