At CES, Yahoo is making its presence felt in the budding broadband-to-the TV space with its "Yahoo Widget Engine." It has announced deals with TV manufacturers Samsung, LG, Sony and Vizio (see next post). It's an impressive list, and these Yahoo-enabled TVs are expected in the market later in '09.

Some of you may recall that the Yahoo Widget Engine debuted last summer as part of a broader alliance with Intel called the "Widget Channel". The two companies have come together to create an applications framework running on new Intel media processing chips. An SDK allows 3rd party developers to use web-standard technologies to develop applications for TVs and other CE devices. That's a mouthful, but the news coming out of CES appears to show that Yahoo/Intel are making progress building out the ecosystem of both TV manufacturers and 3rd parties applications.

In addition to Yahoo content like news, weather, finance and Flickr, there's 3rd party content from USA Today, YouTube, eBay and Showtime. And there are premium movie and TV programs from Netflix, Amazon VOD and Blockbuster. The list of others involved goes on.

All of this is very positive for the budding broadband-to-the-TV space and clearly demonstrates how much emphasis the non-incumbent video service provider (cable/satellite/telco) world is placing on "over the top" services. As expected, these incumbents have a big disruptive bull's-eye on their foreheads. For the numerous 3rd parties that have never had access to the consumers' TV, broadband's openness provides their first-ever entry pass.

As exciting as all this is, the jumble of TV, content, technology and aggregation brands coming to market is prime to create mass confusion for consumers being targeted with these services. Here's the scenario: a prospective TV buyer walks into a Best Buy just looking for a new HDTV, but pretty quickly starts hearing about all these different services and brands. Within minutes the consumer's head is going to be swimming. Which service and content is free and which costs extra? How does it all connect? What if I already have Netflix, Flickr or YouTube passwords - do they automatically work? Do I need to change something that's already in my house, like my home network? And who do I call if something's not working right? One sure winner with these new broadband TVs coming out is the Geek Squad!

Still, this is exciting stuff. A whole new world of broadband on the TV content and applications is finally poised to see the light of day and with it will come all kinds of new opportunities.

What do you think? Post a comment now.