Yahoo! Will Invade Your Living Room TV
Yahoo partnered with Intel and a number of consumer electronic makers to introduce a software to run on network-enabled TV, called the Widget Channel. The Widget Channel promises to bring many possibilities (Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, etc..) to your TV but it also brings advertisement to your living room. The latter remains to be seen how the networks entertain the ideas of advertisement overlaid on their contents and the revenue sharing discussion must be interesting).
As you know the fundamental differences between the living room TV and your PC are:
- Distance, the living room TV requires different kind of navigation interaction experience
- Watching experience from 1 viewer (PC) to eventually several viewers (TV)
In order to succeed on the living room TV, the software must comply to these requirements. Granted, several attempts from Microsoft and other software, hardware makers have not completely succeeded to convince the consumer for widely adoption, perhaps due to the addition of new hardware, connectivity, etc… This new implementation from Yahoo & Intel will be less obtrusive, since it will be part of the TV set.
Yahoo! the Widget Channel, will come with a different user interface to let programmers build widgets that can be controlled from a distance with a remote control, said Patrick Barry, Yahoo’s vice president of connected TV at Yahoo.
Intel and Yahoo are major partners in this endeavor. Intel wants its new Media Processor CE 3100 codenamed Canmore to be installed in all new TV set and Yahoo wants to expand the reach of its content and ads. No word from Google! [Via CES.Cnet]
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