Yahoo! Connected TV News

Yahoo! said it has deals with companies, including Samsung, LG Electronics, Sony (SNE) and Vizio, which will produce hi-def TVs that support Yahoo's online services. The new TVs will be on the market as early as this spring, and will allow users access to an array of web activities, as well as increasing viewer interactivity with the programs they're watching.

It's definitely getting crowded in the space, but the Yahoo! Widget Engine angle is what sets this offering apart. Combined with PC connectivity, we're anxious to see support for MKV and more coming down the pike.

Samsung just announced that its new line of TVs will come bundled with Yahoo's new "TV Widgets" platform. The initial applications display photos from Yahoo's Flickr photo service, reports from Yahoo News and Finance and information from eBay, with a streaming TV and movie download applications expected soon.

Samsung and Yahoo just made their mutual love and their love for TV-based web widgets official. In upcoming Samsung HDTV sets, users will be able to use Yahoo web services like Flickr or Yahoo Finance, but most importantly use third party ones like YouTube or ShowTime.

This platform for putting simple web applications — dubbed widgets — on the TV could become the Trojan Horse into the TV set. The Yahoo Widget Engine has a development kit, jointly developed with Intel, which allows just about anyone to develop widgets for the TVs. …now you can use the widget engine to get access to sites such as your own MySpace account, Yahoo News, Yahoo Weather, Flickr, eBay, CBS, The New York Times, Netflix, Amazon, Blockbuster, Showtime, Twitter and USA Today.

The new TVs announced on Wednesday will be in the market as early as the spring and will support widgets—small Internet applications—that run alongside broadcast TV content, but not over it. The applications can be used for a wide array of Web activities, like watching videos on Google Inc's YouTube.com, social networking on News Corp's MySpace.com, tracking stocks and sports teams, buying and selling on eBay, messaging friends using Twitter, or using Yahoo's own photo-sharing website Flickr. The widgets will allow viewers more interaction with the programs they're watching...