Add in all of the video on demand and streaming content from the web and you realise that perhaps the only suitable way to deal with the information is with search – the tool that has made the internet accessible.
Obviously Google has a key advantage in this area, so I was intrigued to see exactly what Google TV could provide.
Cool concepts
Let's be frank – there was some wildly cool concepts on show; Google's app market is becoming as convergent as the company's plans and using Android as the base of Google TV may be a masterstroke, bringing apps that the public already understands.
Voice search, YouTube Leanback, being able to send a video from your mobile to your TV and vice versa, Google TV certainly has its highlights.
But, in light of many of the other TV innovators' early efforts this year, the same problems that have beset IPTV and bringing the web to the biggest screen in your living room, are still present and accounted for.
UK blessed
The UK is blessed with one of the most cutting-edge television markets. In the blue corner you have Sky, pushing 3D, a global leader in HD and a company that took PVRs and made them simple for the British consumer.
Over in the red corner is Virgin, a company with the flagship broadband product for the nation, an exciting future in partnership with TiVo and an already impressive on-demand service through cable.
And in the (possibly) neutral corner is the BBC, a globally unique setup that is publicly funded and involved in not only the likes of Freeview and Freesat, but also the big hope for UK IPTV – Project Canvas.
All three of these big hitters are developing IPTV-like solutions that bear comparison with Google TV – and all three have hit the same kind of problems.
Namely, how much of an internet experience actually works on a television set, and can you get a decent user experience with the wealth of video content already available on the web?
Less than standard
Let's start with the latter – a YouTube app is by no means a rare sight on the newest televisions, and although the latest material has a better chance of being in HD, the majority is certainly not of a particularly high standard.
On a computer screen that's not a massively big deal, but when your screen is a 1080p 42-inch Panasonic and you've got used to HD content, it certainly jars.
Google obviously acknowledged that YouTube in its online form is not suitable for televisions – hence the creation of YouTube Leanback, and it does have the power to make some web video significantly better in quality.
But as quality goes up, so does bandwidth, and unless the video site is set up for televisions then you need to either explain to consumers why their video is running in a box on the Amazon site, or find some way of adapting the player.
It's a tricky situation – and even in the Google TV demonstration, the simple way of switching between traditional TV and video on demand through a website that wasn't YouTube looked less than ideal.
Browsers
Browsers on televisions also cause a large number of arguments; many people, myself included, don't really object to a full browser experience – and the excellent Opera-based Wii browser or the competent PS3 have illustrated that, to some degree at least, this works.
But many people find them difficult and an old argument, often referred to as lean back versus lean forward, rears its head.
Essentially, we lean forward to use our computers and actively peer at what we are doing, built with a TV we lean back and let it wash over us. The argument is clearly reference in the latest YouTube announcement, but it remains at the heart of IPTV discussions.
Curation
And finally 'curation' - the horrible marketing term for just how we actually find the programmes that we want to watch among 500 television channels, thousands of hours of on-demand and the internet's practically endless archives.
Virgin Media's TiVo-powered interface will, almost certainly, use search as the central way of finding content – and, like Google TV, will offer paid for VOD, its own on-demand, linear channels and some internet video (TiVo taps into YouTube for example).