In a significant posting on the Google blog, the company has announced the launch of Google TV, which is positioned as a new experience for television that combines TV with the freedom and power of the Internet.

These new TVs will have the Google Chrome web browser built in, so that users can access websites as well as easily move between television and the web. This was an inevitable next month for Google and starts to open up the TV experience from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. This will make the entire Internet available from the TV, so that it will also become a web browser, a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.

Google TV will use search to give users an easy and fast way to navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies, making it a powerful tool to access a wide range of media. During the announcement at the Google I/O developers conference, the company challenged web developers to start coming up with new web and Android applications designed specifically for the TV experience. Developers can start optimizing their websites for Google TV now and can start to build even richer applications and distribute them through Android Market.

Google says that they have already started building strategic alliances with a number of companies at the leading edge of innovation in TV technology, such as Jinni.com, who produce a next-generation TV application working to provide semantic search, personalized recommendation and social features for Google TV. The company is also working with Sony and Logitech to put Google TV inside of televisions, Blu-ray players and companion boxes. These devices are expected to go on sale after September this year in the US.

Google has created a website and video with more information about this announcement.