By Eric Auchard
Widgets will appear in the corner of a TV screen and work
something like a picture-in-picture window of advanced TV sets.
These small windows let viewers chat with or e-mail friends,
watch videos, track stocks or sports teams or keep up with news
headlines or weather by using a TV remote control.
Widget TV services are being designed to run on a new class
of Intel chips for consumer electronics that enables
high-definition viewing, home-theater-quality audio, 3-D
graphics, and the fusion of Internet and TV features.
Devices based on Intel's CE3100 chip are due in the first
half of 2009, Intel said. Comcast Corp, the largest U.S. cable
TV operator, said in a separate statement with Intel that it
planned to offer TV Widgets next year that work on televisions,
set-top boxes and other TV-connected devices.
"TV will fundamentally change how we talk about, imagine
and experience the Internet," Eric Kim, Intel senior vice
president and general manager of its Digital Home Group, said
in a joint statement with Yahoo.
Intel previewed the new software framework designed for TVs
and TV-enabled devices using its chips at its annual developer
conference in San Francisco this week.
TV Widgets can be personalized and display information from
popular Web services to which viewers belong, including Yahoo
Finance or Sports or eBay auctions. Viewers can choose from a
what promises to be hundreds or thousands of such widgets.
Among the featured services will be Twitter, a service that
lets users keep friends or public spectators updated on daily
activities via messages sent from a range of devices.
Major brands set to offer TV Widgets range from electronics
makers Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Toshiba Corp MTV and
Showtime.
"This is the beginning of a number of distribution
announcements that will go beyond content producers to OEMs,"
Yahoo spokeswoman May Petry said of deals Yahoo will reveal in
coming months with TV makers, known by the industry shorthand
of OEMs, or original equipment manufacturers.
The Widget Channel runs on top of the fifth generation of
Yahoo Widget Engine, a software platform that allows developers
to deliver snippets of the Web such as video, news, or e-mail.
Programmers can build widgets using popular software including
Javascript, XML, HTML and Adobe Systems Inc's Flash.
Yahoo announced ambitious plans to expand beyond computers
onto mobile phones and TVs more than two-and-a-half years ago.
Yahoo's Connected Life division has since struck dozens of
deals with carriers and phone makers to put Yahoo services on
cell phones that could eventually reach hundreds of millions of
phone users globally.
However, Yahoo's push into the TV arena has gone
significantly slower. Earlier this year, Yahoo announced plans
to feature Yahoo widgets on Sony Bravia Web-linked TVs and
Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing service on Apple TV software.
(Additional reporting by Duncan Martell; Editing by Braden
Reddall)
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