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(pic via Guyism.)

It’s too early to say definitively whether Google TV will “change the way we think about television itself,” as Blip.TV CEO Mike Hudack wrote today (h/t RWW), but it’s off to a good start. Following on Google’s official announcement of the service at Google I/O in May, today the company has announced some of the many partners with which it will collaborate when Google TV launches later this fall. (CBC.ca says that Google TV will be available this month, but I can’t find any news to that effect besides Sony’s launch of the Google TV-compatible NSX-46GT1 web TV on October 12th, which may or may not correspond with when the service itself is available.)

On the media side, Google’s launch partners include Turner Broadcasting — “including TBS, TNT, CNN, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, available anytime through Google TV” — NBC Universal’s CNBC Real Time, HBO, the NBA, and a few news sites like The New York Times and USA Today. On the techier content side, they’ve got Amazon Video on Demand, Netflix, Napster, VEVO, Pandora, and Twitter. Quite a lineup, and their demo video (below), shows that the TV apps produced by this collaboration aren’t just dumped from the web, but have been tailored for an integrated Internet-TV experience.

The Google I/O developer conference continued this morning with the official announcement of Google TV, the search giant’s much anticipated foray into the televisual and attempt at revolutionizing the format. Trying to create revolutions has become something of Google’s MO, what with the hype machine driving the releases of Google Wave and the Nexus One superphone, and if you bought into that hype you might be a bit wary about buying into this latest of Google paradigm shifts. All the same, Google has clearly invested some serious thought into how to answer the now age-old question of “How do you rightly combine the computer screen with the TV screen?” And in a way that makes one wonder where the competition has been all this time.

Google and their partners have worked on a suite of hardware and software — from set-top boxes, to apps, to TVs — that will work together to make channel surfing a thing of the past and do away with those necessarily evil guide menus that most of us have gotten used to. Centering on search (this is Google after all), customers will be able to search for their preferred content via a universal search bar, save it, and come back to it whenever they please. Making use of the Android platform, the extensibility of the experience to different devices is pretty clear and only depends of developers’ imaginations as to how you might use your Android smartphone or even computer as a part of watching TV. To get a clearer idea of what I’m talking about, check out the video below.

After trying its hand at countless desktop, mobile, and web apps and products, Google has ambitions towards shaking up yet another, historically difficult frontier: television. According to the New York Times, Google is partnering up with Intel and Sony to develop Google TV, a new, Android OS-based platform with a Chrome browser (currently not supported by Android) and aspirations towards “mak[ing] it as easy for TV users to navigate Web applications … as it is to change the channel.” They’ve tapped Logitech to work on the peripherals.

Top-down attempts to hook up television with the web have not been especially successful in the past (see: MSN TV), and even Apple had what’s generally thought to be a clunker with its media-centric Apple TV, though TechCrunch’s MG Siegler thinks that Google TV could angry up Apple’s competitive spirit and revive its TV platform.

But the key idea behind Google TV isn’t so much “let’s figure out a way to bring the Web to your television set” so much as who would be doing a lot of the figuring: third-party developers.