For five years, Yahoo has been eying the TV screen as a potential platform. Now, after securing partnerships with all of the top TV makers and IP-based content providers, Yahoo has made its Widget Developer Kit publicly available.
The app store gold rush can now be extended to the TV, and fully IP-based television doesn't look that far away.
Anyone can download Yahoo's Widget development kit and make tools for their connected TVs that fetch content from the Internet, and these devices can simply be made to enhance your own television experience, shared with friends, or marketed to the world at large through Yahoo's Widget Gallery.
With the Widget Gallery functionality built into 2010-model TVs from Samsung, LG, Vizio, and HiSense, users will find a whole library of Internet content already in front of them. With widgets from Netflix, Blockbuster, Showtime, Pandora, Amazon On Demand, Roxio CinemaNow, Vudu, CBS, CNBC, NBC.com, and Sky News, an appealing degree of customization will be right at the consumers' fingertips.
A TV fully stocked with Yahoo-powered widgets has so much on-demand content available, it's starting to rival anything the cable or satellite company could offer.
"Personally, I've been working in interactive television services for over twenty years now, and this is it, it's happening!" Yahoo Connected TV's senior director and chief architect Ronald Jacoby told Betanews this morning.
Thanks to the widespread familiarity of app stores, Yahoo finally stands before a public that understands the value of software customization on our most commonly used devices.
"CBS, NBC, and such are on the platform, they're not doing a lot of video today because they're still trying to figure out what all of this means in their head," Jacoby said. "But the video we're using is MPEG4, it's not like we're inventing something new in terms of video format that requires a new codec or anything like that. We're just using h.264 which is the direction all this streaming stuff is going."
It's still a few years away, but It looks the age of fully IP-based TV will be ushered in with the help of Widgets.
The Yahoo Connected TV Widget Developer kit is available now on connectedtv.yahoo.com.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
