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Intel and Yahoo Look to Widgetize the Living Room Web
This morning at the Intel Developer Forum, Intel and Yahoo announced a joint initiative to bring Internet widgets to TV. The two companies are teaming up in an effort they believe may help jump-start the nascent living-room-web market, which up to this point has seen a lot of products, but very little consumer adoption.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the announcement is the insistence by both companies that OEMs who sign up to put the widget channel (Intel’s name for the product) on their box must offer the consumer access to all of the widgets in the gallery. The gallery, which will be managed by Yahoo, will offer services by any company that uses the widget platform. Conceptually, it’s hard to get one’s mind around the concept of having a service provider set-top box that offers a whole host of widgets to stream third-party web services, but conceivably that’s a scenario that could be realized.
Japanese Teamwork Brings Web to TV
Here in the United States, we tend to navel gaze a bit when it comes to technology and new media, but other countries like Japan have been leading adoption of mobile content and advertising, gaming and new content models such as IPTV for some time. Sure, much of the push for new models of video consumption has been happening here in the States, with the likes of Google/YouTube, Apple/iTunes and Hulu. But while we’ve been discussing new set-top boxes from the likes of Roku, Japan has been quietly pushing networking connectivity and Internet content directly to the TV.
As you might expect, much of this push has come from the dominant consumer electronics sector. While most of us are aware of the push by Japanese CE vendors such as Sony and Nintendo to Wi-Fi enable their video games like the PSP and DS, a lesser-known trend has the been the widespread push to put Ethernet connectivity in TVs. Thanks in part to the Networked Digital Television efforts, many consumer electronics manufacturers for some time have been integrating connectivity to allow for software upgrades, Internet browsing and other connected TV services.
Many of the same TVs have also integrated web browsers. These browsers, first designed to comply with the Japanese ARIB standard for Broadcast Markup Language, have been integrated into most TVs that sell today in Japan. Companies like OpenTV have worked with Panasonic, while Japanese browser specialist ACCESS has also found some success with its BML compliant browser.
So, what are consumers watching on all these network-connected digital TVs equipped with browsers? Some manufacturers have been creating their own Internet portals for delivering web content to TVs, but in February 2007 six companies — Panasonic, Sony, Sony Communication Network, Toshiba, Sharp and Hitachi — banded together (with the prodding by the Japanese government) to create AcTVila. The typical AcTVila portal on a Japanese TV includes a variety of content such as weather (called e-weather), promotional info for TV programs, local news and merchant information. Read more of this story
Is Vudu the iPod of for-Pay Internet Video?
The Internet video download market has had a rough go of it lately. With Google (GOOG) bailing on its efforts to sell shows on Google Video, Blockbuster (BBI) buying Movielink for pocket change, and even Apple’s (AAPL) video business still accounting for only a smidgen of music sales two years after its launch, it’s a wonder that some pundits aren’t saying the future of Internet video is one that is going to be entirely ad-supported.
Call me crazy, but I think for-pay video on the Internet has a future as well. Sure, the majority of TV shows, user-generated content and all sorts of other video will mainly be paid for using ads, but there are some types of content for which consumers will pull out their credit cards. And I’m not just talking porn and Major League Baseball.
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