14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo is toiling away at its TV products and is now announcing an extended partnership with Sony to bring its TV widgets to more countries, 100 in total up from just 16. The seven-fold increase in market coverage can only be a good thing for Yahoo, but the elephant in the room is Google TV. With Google making a serious play for the TV market, Yahoo’s widgets seem instantly outdated. But Yahoo is defending its product saying its approach is more suited to the TV environment.
“With the Yahoo! Widget Engine already available in millions of living rooms globally, today we’re announcing an expanded partnership with Sony, bringing TV Widgets to Sony BRAVIA LCD TVs in more than 100 countries,” Yahoo announced.
“In our earliest days of bringing the Yahoo! Widget Engine to TV, we knew that we had a compelling product to address a rapidly growing market of more than 70 million consumers that interact with Internet content while watching TV. Addressing this consumer need also creates an economic opportunity for TV manufacturers, publishers, advertisers, and our more than 7,000 registered developers,” the announcement added.
Yahoo says it has been working on expanding the reach of the Yahoo Widget Engine since its launch, more than a year ago. It has partnered with some of the top TV-set manufacturers in the world, but also with other CE manufacturers to bring the platform to set-top boxes and other devices.
Yahoo’s TV widgets enable users to consume web content like news or Flickr photos, but also to get online information on things like weather, all of this while watching TV. Yahoo says this last part is crucial to the experience and that web content should not get in the way of actually watching TV.
Google TV has a similar goal, not to interfere with the TV-watching experience too much, but it is also more ambitious about what it can do to enhance it. Still, Google TV is not on the market yet and, when it does arrive, later this year, it will come at a cost higher than that of regular TV sets. In the end, it will be the consumers that decide what is the better choice.