Embrace, extend and extinguish is the term introduced during the Microsoft anti-trust case to describe Microsoft’s generic strategy.

Must be a pretty good strategy. Seems to me that Google is at least implementing the embrace and extend part.

For those that did not hear, last week Vincent Dureau, the person in charge of television technology for Google, came out in a speech and proclaimed that the Internet won’t scale for television.

Oh Really?

Bob Cringely has a insightful series of posts on Google’s television strategy (here is the first). And I think he is at least close to right. Here’s what he has to say about Dureau’s statement.

As the cable companies breathed a sigh of relief, Dureau went on to offer Google’s search, ad, and video services to cable operators, helping them provide a more personalized experience for viewers and a more profitable service for broadcasters. Imagine the usual cable shows with personalized ads from Google’s huge inventory from those 100,000 servers shortly to be installed in Google’s new data center in the Netherlands.

It’s a grand vision for broadcasters, but it is also a lie.

The future isn’t as dire as Dureau predicted. You have to parse his words and listen to them through a Google filter to understand the reality here.

There is clearly a crisis approaching as Internet video grows, but what Dureau said was that viewers can’t expect the Internet to provide them with the experience they have come to expect. That experience would be shifting back and forth in real time among dozens to hundreds of channels requiring huge amounts of either processing power or bandwidth. The current cable model is biased toward excess bandwidth carrying all those channels in parallel. An Internet system would be constrained by the limited bandwidth of the last mile, so it would require upstream video switching and a resulting high server load. So yes, the current cable viewing experience is clearly beyond the capability of the Internet infrastructure, but that’s just stating the obvious. What’s ignored here are the effects of time and of changing viewer needs. If the Internet today can’t give viewers what they can currently get from their cable systems, will it at some point in the future be able to give viewers a better (if different) experience? Yes.

The future lies in watching precisely the video you want to watch precisely when YOU (rather than some programming executive) want to watch it. This requires a client-server distribution system for more than just ads and it will come as bandwidth and server capacity increase. I’ve spent the last three weeks explaining exactly how that will happen. But first Google has to make itself indispensable to European cable companies, to get a toehold in their market. Only when they are totally dependent on Google ad services will the search giant reveal its true video ambitions in Europe…. and the world.

Embrace and extend. Rinse and repeat.