In August 2008 Yahoo! and Intel announced a partnership to bring the Internet to HDTV sets using Yahoo!’s widget platform. In the movie above you can see a demo of what the Yahoo! Widgets on TV would look like. Yahoo! lists a number of existing TV widgets and future widgets which are not available yet. Included are widgets for using FlickR, MySpace, CBS Entertainment with Showtime, Netflix, Twitter, The New York Times and others to follow.
At the same time Intel is working with Adobe to bring the Flash Player and HD Flash video streaming to TV sets. Intel announced the partnership in early January 2009:
Adobe Systems and Intel Corporation today announced plans to collaborate on the development to port and optimize Adobe Flash technology for the Intel Media Processor CE 3100. This effort is expected to provide consumers with richer and more seamless Web-based and video viewing experiences through advanced Intel-based cable set-top boxes, Blu-ray Disc players, digital TVs and retail connected AV devices.
The high-definition capabilities of the Adobe Flash Platform, together with the Intel Media Processor CE 3100, the first in a new family of purpose-built Intel System on Chips (SoCs) for CE devices, creates a powerful entertainment hub capable of delivering rich Web content and Adobe Flash based applications to an array of Internet-connected CE devices. Intel and Adobe are working together to optimize both the Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Flash Lite for the CE3100. Intel plans to ship the first CE3100 with support for an optimized implementation of Adobe Flash Lite before mid-2009.
While previous versions of Flash Lite haven’t shown good performance, it will be interesting to see if Flash Lite in combination with the CE 3100 processor family will deliver enough performance for running even complex Flash applications. It is certainly good timing to bring the Internet to TVs again, after we have seen the failure of technologies like the OpenTV or Java MHP platforms in the past. The Widget or Flash approach is a lot more light-weight compared to the Java-based approaches to trying to bring interactivity to TV sets. Another advantage is high resolution of HDTV nowadays.
Yahoo!’s move to partner with Intel seems to be the right approach to get widgets onto TV screens, but the functionality is limited. I personally wouldn’t like the fact that the widgets are covering up part of the TV content area, solutions which automatically adjust the TV content area to the remaining space would be a lot more user friendly. But that would require deeper integration of the widget platform with the TV sets.
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