How does Yahoo! Connected TV fit the new TV world?

Lately there has been a bit of press around Yahoo! Connected TV. Having had some experience with it as a consumer about a year ago, I thought I'd review the concept briefly.

Yahoo! Connected TV (YTV) is an Application that runs on specific TV and set-top boxes that have integrated this application. It is also an Application Framework using which third parties can write widgets for TVs and set-top boxes that support YTV. For example, the Flickr widget on YTV displays your's and your contacts' photostreams on the TV - nice if you want to share photographs with friends and family on the largest screen in the house.

Further, YTV is aware of the programming that a viewer is watching at any point and can use the information to make useful suggestions such as extracting statistics relevant to a sports event currently being watched or prompting a user to "buy now" if the user happens to be watching a shopping channel.

At some level, YTV looks similar to Google TV (GTV).  For example, GTV has a notion of applications (widgets) that run on top of the GTV platform. However, the GTV platform is much "thicker" compared to YTV. GTV includes a full-on web browser and purports to combine all of programming/video available on the web with all of the programming available from traditional TV/Cable/Satellite channels. YTV on the other hand is a much "thinner" platform aiming to provide a neatly integrated experience via widgets layered on top of traditional TV programming.

GTV is thus a bigger initiative with many more moving parts and greater risk and reward than YTV. That said, the current incarnation of YTV appears to be gaining traction with some viewers and Industry analysts.


Related articles

• The brave New-TV world (hitechenergy.blogspot.com)
• Netflix streaming over a Samsung setup gets a B+ (hitechenergy.blogspot.com)
• Networked DVD players' interfaces need work (hitechenergy.blogspot.com)

Sources
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703419104576068351674875680.html (Jan 2011)
http://searchenginewatch.com/3641733 (Jan 2011)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10217972-1.html (Apr 2009)

Note
While I currently work at Yahoo!, I have no inside information regarding the Yahoo! Connected TV product, My impressions are based solely on the sources above and my experience with the Yahoo! Connected TV widget on ATT U-verse's cable box circa Q1 2010.