Samsung announces HDTVs with Yahoo Widgets
The broadband-connected television market will be in full bloom at CES 2009, with Samsung announcing that its newest lineup of HDTVs will sport "Internet@TV", a Yahoo-powered widget interface.
The availability of TV-based widgets traces back to last year's CES, when Intel CEO Paul Otellini showed off the "Canmore" system-on-a-chip in televisions and set top boxes. Later on in the year, at the Intel Developers' Forum in San Francisco, Yahoo expounded a bit on the concept, adding its JavaScript widget engine to the Canmore architecture. Along with service provider Comcast, the companies discussed the Widget Channel distribution mechanism, and the various web-style applications that users would be able to load onto their televisions.
Today, Samsung announced it has realized these technologies with "Internet@TV -- Content Service," which will be shown off at CES this week. Select 2009 broadband-connected Samsung HDTVs will come with the service built in, with the ability to access JavaScript and XML apps from the likes of Flickr, YouTube, Yahoo News properties, USA Today, eBay, and Showtime Networks. Samsung says the widget-enabled TVs it is showing this week will not come to retail until Spring.
BetaNews will be providing in-depth CES coverage this week, including a live blog of Samsung's keynote on Wednesday afternoon.