Web Widgets on TVs

A common failing is to become enamoured with your present (e.g. our current city of residence, our current area of work) to the extent that we dismiss all other options as being inferior or less advanced. Such comparisons are often unfair as our views on these other options do not take into account all the changes that have happened since we last looked at them.

I have been working in the area of internet applications and services on mobile devices for the past few years and had not been tracking the impact of the internet on home entertainment, especially televisions. I read an article today on how the Yahoo Widget Engine has been integrated onto Samsung TVs (http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090324/yahoo-widgets-lend-brains-to-boob-tube/); Sony and LG Electronics are also planning to release similar products.

It will be interesting to observe how the evolution of web widgets on televisions (or in the cable industry) compares with the evolution of widgets on mobile devices (or in the mobile industry). Yahoo and Opera offer widget solutions for TVs and mobiles and if we were to extrapolate based on the the shape Yahoo solutions are in, widgets on mobiles (http://mobile.yahoo.com/gallery) seems to be further ahead as compared to solutions for TVs (http://connectedtv.yahoo.com/).

Apart from Yahoo and Opera, other players in the mobile industry are also active in enabling widgets; device manufacturers such as Nokia and Motorola have their own widget frameworks and mobile operators are attempting to standardize security mechanisms and APIs to enable widgets to access device services (the OMTP BONDI initiative). I tried googling for standardization efforts in the cable/television industry but was unable to find anything similar.

There is also the larger question on how the relationships between the different players in the mobile industry (i.e. application developers, operators, software platform providers, device manufacturers) compare with the relationships in the TV ecosystem (TV manufacturers, set-top box manufacturers, cable operators, channels, content providers). I hope to improve my understanding of this area in the coming weeks.