Widgets, TV, Internet...and Intel

posted by Bill Kircos on January 08, 2009

Will we ever be able to easily merge the Internet and the TV?

It will happen, someday. Many companies, including Intel, have and continue to try and skin that cat in a variety of ways, each with various degrees of success.

Have a read of a New York Times article and Disney's take on widgets, and tightening joint work between Hollywood and technology companies.

In it, and during her afternoon keynote at CES, Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, talks about Intel's widget approach to TV and the web. It's related to a strategy that Intel's Eric Kim outlined last August, during our Intel Developer Forum where we outline a gigantic amount of future Intel product and technology plans.

Wikipedia has a good technical definition of widgets. They are basically a tool that allows us to constantly update content to web sites via a simple box or icon on your screen. Adding widgets to what are becoming larger and larger and more easily viewable plasma and LCD screens like Facebook is a promising approach to marrying the Internet with our normal TV viewing habits and preferences.

Sure, there are no promises, but when a company and brand that carries not only Disney but ABC, ESPN and others is looking at it, many take notice.

The good news is, technology is finally coming along to the point where we can start painting a picture that used to sound like Fantasy Island, but now could come to fruition over the next few years: a super-fast wireless broadband network like WiMAX covering entire cities could bring a fat Internet pipe to televisions, handhelds, cars and many more places, on a variety of computing and CE devices. Things like widgets, and especially the younger generation's insatiable desire to be online and social, will just bolster all of it.

 

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tagged: ceprocessors, ces, disney, internettv, widget