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Yahoo Wants to Bring the Internet to Your Living Room

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Aug 20, 2008

Summary

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. A