Yahoo Wants to Bring the Internet to Your Living Room
At Intel's Developer Forum, Yahoo today announced an initiative to bring the Internet to your TV set through what it has dubbed the 'Widget Channel.' While many a company has tried to bring the Internet to the living room (and mostly failed in the process), Yahoo is taking a slightly different approach by not trying to bring a full browser experience to the TV, but by creating a platform for widget developers.
The Widget Channel will allow developers to create widgets that will display on TV screens in JavaScript, XML, HTML and Flash. Yahoo will curate a directory of widgets and has currently signed up Blockbuster, CBS, CinemaNow, Disney-ABC, eBay, Joost, MTV, Samsung, Toshiba, and, interestingly, Twitter, which Yahoo demoed during the announcement at the IDF.
Comcast is also joining in the effort and will start testing the Widget Channel framework in the first half of 2009.
Challenges
By just focusing mostly on relatively simple widgets for now, Yahoo is at least partly sidestepping one of the major issues with bringing the Internet onto a TV set: navigation. As long as you only want to bring up some widgets on your screen, a simple remote control will do. However, as a typical usage scenario, Yahoo expects its users to want to browse to a friend's Flickr photos while watching a TV show - at that point, trying to find a set of photos on Flickr might just a bit more than your standard remote can handle.
Yahoo might be planting a Trojan horse in every living room here by creating a demand for Internet enabled TVs - but the real problems for interactive TV have never really been technical. Most users simply aren't interested in interacting with their TVs beyond flipping channels. The Widget Channel might just be simple enough for more folks to start using it and it might precipitate a cultural shift in how we look at our TVs, but so far, every other similar initiative has failed because of a lack of demand.
If you would like to see the slides that accompanied the IDF presentation, you can find them here (PDF). We will also provide a link to the video of the presentation once it becomes available.
Comments
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"Yahoo will curate a directory of widgets and has currently signed up ...Twitter..."
Oh hells yeah! That'll be hilarious to have my friends Tweets show up on the screen while we are all watching the same show. That's what Joost has been promising for years - annotated television.
No wonder Yahoo told Microsoft to "F" off, being able to text into your friends TVs shows with live snotty comments will be worth billions of dollars. Y!TV FTW
Posted by: Todd | August 20, 2008 2:05 PM
This is brilliant. This is one of the reasons Yahoo! needed to stay independent from MS.
Posted by: Fabian Schonholz | August 20, 2008 7:56 PM
yes, yahoo is so cool, I use yahoo more than google...
Posted by: projectlib | August 20, 2008 9:09 PM
Wow, isn't Yahoo! suddenly becoming relevant again?
Posted by: Mike Riversdale
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August 21, 2008 5:02 AM
"every other similar initiative has failed because of a lack of demand."
That's like saying, pre-iPhone, that every mobile web initiative suffered for lack of demand. Now that the iPhone has been successful, we know there's a strong "demand" for mobile web browsing. In hindsight, the thing the iPhone did that no one else did was deliver a working solution, comprised of lots of innovations around web browsing on mobile devices. The same will be true for whoever succeeds in bridging the gap between the television and the Internet or even the Web. They'll innovate and deliver something that just works.
Posted by: Rakesh Agrawal | August 21, 2008 6:49 AM
Nice to know and good news for internet professionals. Whereas interactive tv is hard to imagine it is expected for about 2010 and as this project beside others shows internet technologies like xml will be a big part of it. I wrote a brief article about interactive video lately.
Posted by: emediablogger | August 22, 2008 8:44 AM