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Viewers will soon be able to integrate widget applications into their television viewing experience thanks to a partnership between Intel and Yahoo.
The two companies have developed a hardware/software platform in which TV sets, cable set-top boxes and optical media players are built with special Intel processors and supporting a Yahoo software framework which gives users online functionality, writes IT World.
By pressing a button on a remote, users can access a toolbar with widgets that can then be activated with the remote. Users can pull information from the web, interact with friends, or shop at ecommerce sites, the two companies said during a demo at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco yesterday.
The application is called the Widget Channel; a Widget Channel development kit will be available to developers, including TV and other CE device makers, advertisers and publishers.
Yahoo’s web page about “connected TV” describes the application: “TV Widgets give you the best of the Internet in perfect harmony with the simplicity and reliability of your television. They’re as rich, varied, and useful as your favorite sites on the Web, because they ARE your favorite sites on the Web, reinterpreted for TV.”
Blockbuster, CBS Interactive, Disney-ABC Television Group, eBay, GE, MTV, Samsung Electronics, Showtime and Toshiba are all planning to deploy widgets on the channel.
Devices should hit the market in early 2009.
The effort may be the late-borne release of a project conceived back in the Terry Semel days of Yahoo, back when Yahoo seemed to be moving away from its internet roots and toward a vague, video and content-centric model developed by the former studio executive, writes MarketingVOX.
To see five years of (depressing) coverage of television’s lack of ability to get along with other media, you can explore our coverage on convergence.
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