Google to sell satellite TV ads

The deal underscores Google's ambition to become a premier broker of advertising for not just the Internet, but TV, radio, print publications and other media.

Google said it would sell a portion of EchoStar's TV ads through an automated online auction system that's similar to the one it has used to dominate Web-search ads.

"We think that TV is becoming more like the Web," said Keval Desai, Google's director of product management for TV advertising. "If you think about TV, you have hundreds of networks. That's a lot of content. The audience is getting increasingly fragmented. If you're an advertiser, it's very hard for you to go and target these networks one by one. You need a scalable, automated platform."

The companies did not reveal the financial terms or duration of their contract. EchoStar, based in Englewood, Colo., has 13.1 million subscribers to its Dish Network service.

"For us, it's an investment in the future of advertising," said Michael Kelly, EchoStar executive vice president of advertising. "It's a multiyear contract, but we think it should last forever."

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google has made inroads with radio and print advertising, striking deals in recent months with radio broadcasters and major newspaper publishers.

The deal with EchoStar represents Google's first jump into TV, whose roughly $70-billion-a-year ad market dwarfs the estimated $17 billion a year spent on Internet ads. At this point, though, it's a dive into the shallow end of the pool, because it involves only a small percentage of EchoStar's airtime.

The field is already crowded with start-ups such as Los Angeles-based SpotRunner and a tangled network of ad-buying agencies, some run by multibillion-dollar conglomerates. It's unclear how willing they will be to work with Google, whose advances onto new turf are raising eyebrows across the media industry.

Google is betting that the innovations that helped make it the juggernaut online will win customers offline.

Desai said Google offered a single marketplace for TV ad buyers who have traditionally had to cut deals with individual shows on individual networks.