Will the Yahoo! Widget Engine bring Internet apps and services to the Digital (Connected) Home. Briefing with Patrick Barry, VP of Yahoo! Connected TV.
I have to admit that I never got the whole idea of Yahoo!’s Connected Life division. They talked about connectivity and then immediately jumped to mobility. Mobile. Mobile. Mobile. Blah!
My issue with mobility has to do with the fundamental product management question of reach and addressability. As in (1) how many people does this technology reach?, and (2) what is the size of the addressable audience or market?
Because the technology industry is really good at turning large markets into many, many small markets. This is good if you’re trying to sell a better mousetrap…bad if you’re trying to deliver media to the largest possible audience.
And mobile communications industry tends to the former — turning large markets into many smaller ones.
The good news is that Yahoo! has broken Connected Life into Yahoo! Mobile and Yahoo Connected TV, the latter group is focused on delivering Internet services and applications to large markets. Working in partnership with the consumer electronics (primarily television vendors) companies, the company has been working to get the Yahoo! Widget Engine installed on a growing number of devices in the market today.
Compare this to the cable industry’s tru2way initiative, and you’ll see the difference between the Internet and PayTV. According to Patrick Barry at Yahoo!, this new generation of widget-enabled television sets will be increasingly capable of rendering feature-rich graphics — more so than they can today. Graphics-processing capabilities are critical as we converge Web browsing and Internet applications onto television sets.
Anyway, it was an interesting briefing. Plenty of Yahoo! competitors (such as YouTube(Google), Amazon, and Facebook) are developing on top of Yahoo!’s Widget Engine.
Next question: who owns the data that these devices are already kicking back? And is a widget platform a better way to deliver next-generation interactive advertising on the television set?