Can Widgets Save the Television Industry?

With Internet Connected television, Yahoo and Samsung try to take a leaf out of Apple's design playbook

By Helen Walters

Related Items

• The Future of TV Special Report Table of Contents

Four widgets are currently available on the Internet connected TV, including one for the Flickr photo-sharing service Yahoo

Story Tools

• post a comment
• e-mail this story
• print this story
• order a reprint
• suggest a story
• digg this
• save to del.icio.us

Icons for available widgets scroll along the bottom of the Internet-connected television screen Yahoo

• View Slide Show

Convergence has been the buzzword of the media world for years now. But while mobile might have won many of the recent headlines, a groundswell of innovation is under way in the television industry. Not least are new initiatives spearheaded by Yahoo! (YHOO), Intel (INTC), and Samsung (SAME_pq.F), which aim to bring the Internet to a television near you.

Yahoo's Connected TV platform is now available on selected Samsung televisions, with sets to come later this year from Sony (SNE), LG, and Vizio, too. The overarching strategy seems to borrow heavily from Apple (AAPL), whose success with its iPhone App Store has rewritten the rule book for content and service providers in the phone industry. That's not the only similarity in the approach: The interface design of the Connected platform has been spearheaded by a former Apple interaction designer, Arlo Rose.

Internet-enabled Television

Rose also has some of the infamous chutzpah of his old boss, Steve Jobs. A Silicon Valley veteran, Rose sold his company, Pixoria, to Yahoo in 2005. Pixoria had developed the Konfabulator widget engine on which the Connected system is based. He joined the Connected team in 2008—and promptly scrapped the three years work that had already gone into the project. "Bless the people who had worked on the product up until then, but they hadn't done a good job," says Rose. "It was a mess."

In effect, Rose wanted to redefine the entire experience of Internet-enabled television. "The challenge was to throw out what we thought a TV product needed to be," he says. "I wanted us to make something we would all enjoy using rather than just do the same again."

Perhaps not surprisingly, Rose thought the answer lay in widgets, small software applications that offer tailored, pared-down versions of sites found online. Using the regular TV remote and clicking at a normal-looking TV, the user accesses the Web via a wireless or broadband connection. Four widgets are currently available, for Yahoo's news, weather, finance, and Flickr photo-sharing services. Future partners—Yahoo and the various TV set makers will sign them up—include MySpace (NWS), Netflix (NFLX), Amazon.com (AMZN), Joost, and Twitter.

Content appears in a sidebar to the left side of the screen, with regular programming playing underneath (a full-screen option is also available.) The menu is intuitive and easy to manage, given the primitive functionality offered by the remote. And though the animations and transitions are hardly as slick as those on an iPhone, it's even elegant.

Business Exchange

Track and share business topics across the Web.