Mark Hachman - ExtremeTech
On Wednesday, Intel and Yahoo announced a sweeping initiative to bring a widget-based platform to embed applications – and ads – directly on your HDTV. Several major CE manufacturers expressed support.
The two also announced the combination of the Intel Media Processor CE3100 ("formerly known as "Canmore") with the Yahoo open widget-based platform for TV.
"We're at the dawn of a new era, delivering rich Internet applications with the power of Web 2.0," said Eric Kim, Intel senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Home Group during a keynote at the Intel Developer Forum here.
"We realize that there have been many attempts to bring Internet to the TV with limited success – remember Web TV? – but what the difference is now is bringing the full richness of the Internet to televisions," Kim added.
The partnership won on-stage endorsements from Comcast, Disney and Sony, and supporting statements from CBS, Motorola, Samsung and Toshiba accompanied video of the event projected onto a display. Intel also announced an Intel CE Solutions Alliance as a means of combining the expertise of hardware, software, and other solutions providers. The Yahoo-Intel partnership is a global one, although the U.S. will be the launch region.
Although the technology is available now, it will have to wait for actual OEM product commitments. None were mentioned.
The Intel-Yahoo partnership was most likely the shocker of this year's Intel Developer Forum. Historically, Intel has never been able to crack the television market, which has traditionally meant set-top boxes designed around MIPS processors. But Intel has used its IDF shows to make the case that software runs best on the Intel architecture, a case that the company has apparently successfully made to consumer electronics OEMs.
One of the failed attempts to merge the Internet and television, ironically, was "Viiv," Intel's apparent brand for a connected TV, which the company launched in 2005 and refined a year later. "We think in order to address the mass market of television, we need a purposeful foundation. Viiv was not a purposeful foundation" because it was designed around the PC, Kim said.
Interestingly, an Intel-Yahoo demo booth included functional boxes from Tatung and Gigabyte, evidence that the Taiwan market considers this a viable device. Once one Taiwan supplier endorses a concept, such as the Mobile Internet Device, most of the island's other technology firms tend to jump in with their own models.
What is it?
"Essentially, we're merging the content of the cinematic Internet with the TV in a way that's never been done before," said Patrick Barry, vice president of Connected TV for Yahoo. But the two haven't achieved the kind of heights it can achieve, he said, even after the advent of HDTVs or even 3D.
"It's a real category; not a novelty, and it can transform the business," Barry said.
The Intel-Yaho partnership either will require a set-top box, or the Canmore platform integrated directly into the TV. At press time, the price or availability of such set-top boxes was not known, but Kim said a set-top box would cost "substantially less" than the $300 charged by Sony for a similar device. The technology could also be built directly in to TVs, Blu-ray players, or other devices.
The experience, however, includes a "river of widgets" residing at the bottom of the HDTV TV screen, allowing full immersion into the Internet from the couch. The river of widgets appears to cycle through from left to right, and can include integration with Flickr, stock prices, or other widgets.
At the core of the software platform is the Yahoo Widget Engine, also known as Konfabulator, now in its fifth generation, Barry said. It's the same engine used for Yahoo's desktop PC widgets, so desktop widgets will apparently work.
Another feature is called "Sidebar," which expands out the widget (also referred to as a "snippet") into a vertical sidebar alongside one side of the TV. The Flickr snippet, for example, placed a small array of photos in the Sidebar, or what Barry called "a more full featured area in which applications can run in all their glory."
You can even start a slideshow in place of the TV picture. Another cool example was the Blockbuster widget, where you can select a movie trailer and play it in high definition, on your television. Another featured snippet: Twitter.
We expect that the TV dock will be personalized by different users," Barry said. That means personalization, and the ability to log in via a PIN. Parental controls will also be included, he said. Even other media can be accessed via DLNA.
The problem for consumers? Ads. That's how Yahoo pays the bills, and ads are "the currency of the Internet". Yahoo and Intel executives described ads as a better way to buy products, one in which shoes featured on The Hills, for example, could be instantly purchased directly from the TV.
"Today we still spend five times as much money on television as we do on the Internet," added Irvin Gotleib, chief executive officer of GroupM, a $60 billion media investment firm. "Fundamentally, however, everyone sees the same ad, which is not the best kind of targeting initiative, and there is a limited ability to delve into content. This changes the whole accountability."
"It puts the TV on an equal footing with the Internet" and could actually leapfrog it if used effectively, Gotleib said.
The CE3100, based on the Pentium M, is just a few weeks away from production, when it begins shipping to OEMs, Kim said. The chip contains 150 million transistors, about as many as the Pentium 4. But the fact that it can be manufactured on Intel's leading-edge manufacturing processes also means that consumes far less power and can be produced for much cheaper, leading to a cost-effective product for end customers, Kim said. Pricing, however, was not announced.
The Canmore is part of Intel's new system-on-a-chip initiative, first announced in July. Tucked inside it is hardware/softeware decode capabilities for video, including the ability to decode both standard-def MPEG-2 streams as well as high-def H.264 MPEG-4 video. A demo mapped a pair of video streams onto two 3D windows. It also runs Linux.
"There never has been any 3D graphics in this space before, and we think it opens up some dramatic new opportunities," Kim said in a media briefing following the keynote.
A followon chip, called "Sodaville," will be released in 2009 and will use the Atom core.
From a software side, the platform supports all of the expected frameworks: AJAX, HTML, Flash, and Javascript, Kim said, and others are expected to be added. DRM schemes will also be supported, including Windows Media. To prevent virus-laded widgets from being downloaded and crashing a TV, a "gallery service" and the CE working group were set up to vet new widgets, he said.
"At this time, Yahoo is operating the gallery," Barry confirmed.
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