Developers! You can extend your brand, services, and content to a mass market of new users by creating TV Widgets. TV Widgets enable popular Internet services and online media to reach viewers with applications specifically tailored to the needs of TV enthusiasts. The integrated Internet experience, powered by the Yahoo!® Widget Engine, will be available in a variety of consumer electronics products, including television sets manufactured by Samsung®, Sony®, LG® Electronics and VIZIO®. With TV Widgets, developers can deliver new, interactive experiences to millions of television sets in 2009.
TV Widgets are powered by the Yahoo! Widget Engine. This fifth-generation applications platform evolved from the popular Konfabulator® widget platform for the PC—and is now re-engineered specifically for consumer electronics devices. The Yahoo! Widget Engine also provides an entry-level framework for running TV Widgets on the constrained hardware capabilities of today’s integrated Digital TVs. The Widget Development Kit (WDK) is now available to developers, CE manufacturers, advertisers and content publishers, on a limited basis, providing the tools needed to create exciting and engaging TV Widget experiences.
With the Widget Development Kit (WDK), developers and publishers can quickly create and deploy TV Widgets, by leveraging a rich set of interfaces called the Widget Channel API.
Produced in a collaboration between Yahoo! and Intel® and powered by the Yahoo! Widget Engine, the Widget Channel API provides access to popular Internet technologies such as Konfabulator (JAVASCRIPT® and XML) and HTML. The Yahoo! Widget Engine and Widget Channel frameworks implement different levels of functionality from the Widget Channel API. Please fill out the “Tell Me More” section on this page for more information on the Widget Channel API.