Helen Walters at BW wonders if widgetization of TV is the future of the industry.
Icons for available widgets scroll along the bottom of the Internet-connected television screen Yahoo
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.
There is no question that tomorrow’s TVs will be internet enabled and will offer a lot of interactivity. Widgets will be one part of that experience.
