On Wednesday, Intel and Yahoo announced a surprisingly broad plan to add widgets to HDTVs. When I say “surprisingly broad," it's because of all of the support the plan received: content providers (ABC, CBS), CE makers (Sony, Samsung, Toshiba), and Yahoo, of course. Just not Microsoft, which has acknowledged but not responded to my requests for comment on how this will impact its Media Center line.
While I couldn't “drive," I had a chance to see someone else play around with the system, which is already up and running; for you to buy it, however, you'll either need the Intel designed “Menlow" platform built into a new TV, or a set-top box that should cost less than $200. The system appeared rather robust and definitely functional, although the number of widgets was definitely limited.
More to the point, it's pretty. Yahoo designed an attractive GUI, whose only drawback is that it distracts a bit from the television content. By default, the “dock," as Yahoo refers to it in Apple-speak, appears as a ticker tape of functional blocks at the bottom of the screen. Yahoo allows the video to be resized and pushed up, so tuning in to CNBC, for example, might yield a whole series of ticker strips. Each widget, in docked mode, was referred to as a “snippet".
While I couldn't “drive," I had a chance to see someone else play around with the system, which is already up and running; for you to buy it, however, you'll either need the Intel designed “Menlow" platform built into a new TV, or a set-top box that should cost less than $200. The system appeared rather robust and definitely functional, although the number of widgets was definitely limited.
More to the point, it's pretty. Yahoo designed an attractive GUI, whose only drawback is that it distracts a bit from the television content. By default, the “dock," as Yahoo refers to it in Apple-speak, appears as a ticker tape of functional blocks at the bottom of the screen. Yahoo allows the video to be resized and pushed up, so tuning in to CNBC, for example, might yield a whole series of ticker strips. Each widget, in docked mode, was referred to as a “snippet".
