Intel, Yahoo jumpstart living room web marketplace

Intel and Yahoo today announced a partnership to bring widgets to the TV. These targeted applications will allow consumers to access Web services direct from the TV set and represent an important milestone in making the living room an open web marketplace, according to ABI Research Director Michael Wolf.

“What has been done so far is mainly walled-garden efforts by Apple TV and things like the Netflix Roku box,” Wolf said. “There hasn’t been a true open Web services approach to get all this Web content we get on the PC onto the TV with an optimized delivery format. I think that is what their approach is here.”

Announced today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Eric Kim, Intel SVP and GM of the Digital Home Group told attendees that TV viewing is no longer just a passive experience unless the viewer wants it that way. Kim also introduced a new ‘system on a chip’ for TV set-top boxes, called the Media Processor CE 3100 - formerly codenamed Canmore. According to Wolf, the two announcements together make a lot of sense for Intel.

“Intel has a history of wanting to expand their addressable market for their processors,” Wolf said. “They have been working for a couple years around this idea of the connected entertainment devices with their Live platform. That didn’t do that well, so they took a different approach this time.”

From a Yahoo perspective, they’ve seen success with extending their presence from the PC Web to the mobile Web with the Yahoo Go platform, as well as with widgets in general, so the TV might prove to be a natural next step to expand its audience and reach, Wolf said.

The widgets, powered by the Yahoo Widget Engine, can be accessed by the remote control concurrent with TV viewing. The Channel also lets developers write their own TV apps using Javascript, XML, HTML and Adobe Flash technology. Through the open software development partnership, both companies will offer hardware and software support to the consumer electronics OEMs, content owners and application developers bringing the Web content to the TV.