It’s getting harder and harder to find an arena Google isn’t rumored to be at least in talks about getting involved in – and the latest is television. Google has supposedly been having “secret talks” with Simon Fuller, the British producer behind the likes of American Idol (and the Spice Girls among many other things) about a joint venture that could end up pitting Google against the major television networks.

Again, just like the earlier rumor about Google buying Sprint, this deal is interesting for its positives and negatives. On one hand you’d think that Google will eventually want launch into a large scale advertising assault on television – much like it has done on the Internet – and the TV networks would be a vital part of that. Pissing them off by entering into agreements so as to bypass them behind their backs doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.

Then again, these are the television networks – the old behemoths who seem to have their heads so far up their asses that even when they launch something that would seem to be a decent product (Hulu), they hedge their bets at least 3 different ways (by using Amazon Unbox, NBC.com streaming, and now direct downloading) to confuse the hell out of their users. iTunes works because it is simple, not because it is anything that revolutionary – something I have a feeling NBC television execs are going to be realizing by this time next year.

As the Guardian article points out, Google tried their hand at doing what iTunes and the like do by offering shows for purchase on Google Video – and it failed. The question is did it fail because of Google (who effectively killed Google Video with their YouTube purchase) or did Google consciously kill it because they realized it was never going to compete with iTunes and decided a new approach was needed?

Could that new approach be bypassing the networks entirely with the likes of one of the if not the biggest television producers in the world? While the major networks play ring-around-the-rosie and continue to move where their content can be found on the Internet, Google might just be looking long term into getting original television content onto the web themselves.

Remember the Google Television fake video that spread around the Internet in January? Yeah, that might not be that far off – of course minus the whole network participation part.