After years of trying, can the invasion of Televisions with built in widgets bring Internet TV to the mainstream. Widgets which are software applications, could be the thing that marries the Internet with the television set.

It has been over ten that companies have tried to introduce the internet onto the families big screen tv. Time Warner offered the now defunct WebTV, which died pretty quickly and since then nothing has captured the general publics imagination.

However, widgets are cool and will bring the Internet to TV screens by use of the remote control rather than a keyboard and mouse. See our post on TV widgets the big thing in 2009. Pretty soon widgets will be everywhere, in all TVs being sold,” says Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst at Parks Associates, a market research firm in Dallas that specializes in emerging consumer technologies.

So why will it now succeed? Now, most households have a broadband Internet connection, so viewers can stream and process a lot of high quality pictures and data, including video to their screens. In a lot of instances broadband connections are supplied by the same company that delivers the cable television.

And now more consumers are much more comfortable using the internet and downloading applications or ‘apps’ and widgets, on their mobile devices and phones or laptops. The biggest manufacturer and item that has encouraged this is of course the Apple iPhone.

What are Widgets?

TV widgets are small icons that appear along the bottom or side of a television screen. Each performs a different function. One may give you more information about the show your watching, you can find information on the news or weather. You can also use social sites such as Twitter, Facebook or MySpace.

The manufacturers are keen, Sony, Samsung, and LG already offer TV sets capable of displaying widgets and accessing the web. Vizio are offering a keyboard inside its remote. Vizio will also build in Wi-Fi capability, meaning wireless connection.

It is estimated that 400,000 TVs sold in the US this year will be Web-enabled. But by 2013, about 13.8 million TV sets in US households will be Web-enabled, says a study from Parks Associates.

“We think it’s exciting. We think it’s real,” says Howard Bass, a partner at Ernst & Young’s Global Media & Entertainment Center. Last month, Ernst & Young released a report on TV widgets predicting that they “could be the catalyst to widespread adoption of Web-enabled TV.”

Widgets won’t try to duplicate a computer screen on TVs. That’s not what TV viewers are looking for, analysts say. Instead, widgets offer a simple point-and-click experience using the existing TV remote control.

“All they need to know is left, right, up, down, and OK,” says Russ Schafer, senior director for Connected TV at Yahoo. The company announced earlier this year that it had teamed with chipmaker Intel to promote development of widgets for TVs.

Yahoo has tested TV widgets with people from 18-year-olds to those in their 60s and universally found them easy to use, Mr. Schafer says.

The coming months should be “the big blowout year for connected TVs,” Schafer predicts about 2010.

Among the widget connections Yahoo is offering now, or will be shortly, are USA Today’s sports news; YouTube; and casual games, such as Sudoku. Yahoo provides about 20 widgets now but has potentially thousands more in the pipeline, Schafer says, some of which will show up by early 2010.

Another major player in TV widgets, Verizon FiOS, continues to expand its network of digital television and broadband Internet services over its US fiber-optic lines.

Verizon FiOS and Internet customers in the New York City area now can get video of local traffic conditions via a TV widget called “NYC 311.” Live cameras, operated by the City of New York, show conditions on roads in all five boroughs of the city. Viewers can zoom in for a closer look at a particular road and set “favorites” to go immediately to the routes they use to commute each day.

The ESPN Fantasy Football Widget, available to viewers who’ve signed up for ESPN’s fantasy football leagues, displays personalized football statistics, such as box scores, league rankings, and information on players.

In the Yahoo-Intel Widget Gallery, the eBay widget permits users to receive real-time updates on their accounts, place bids, and monitor favorite items. Users can view photos or search for and compare prices of items. A New York Times widget lets viewers see headlines, photos, and stories, and forward them to their mobile phone.

TV watchers are changing, says Maitreyi Krishnaswami, director of interactive video services for Verizon. Many are no longer passive viewers. “Now it’s really about interactive TV and social networking” she says. People are already checking on their fantasy sports teams or commenting on the reality TV show they’re watching using a mobile phone or laptop.

One of the most popular uses of Facebook on Verizon is to access people’s online photo albums and display them on the TV. “What you see are really high-quality images on the television that you can share with your family,” Krishnaswami says.

If these new widgets have advertising then will they clash with advertising being shown on the TV program itself. Then there is the wireless problem, if internet enabled TVs dont have WiFi, viewers will have to link their TV to the Internet through a wired Ethernet connection. Getting that wire to the TV could be a home-networking hassle if the computer and TV are in different rooms.

What will really be interesting in the future, Mr. Scherf says, is if a content provider such as ESPN designs its own widgets to customize and enhance its TV programs. Viewers might be able to decide which sports scores or other information they want displayed in the widget, for example.

While Scherf doesn’t envision people reading e-mail on a TV, the kind of “snackable sharing” represented by Facebook or Twitter “seems to be a fit,” he says.

Today’s early widgets mostly offer a distraction from TV content, such as news or weather. Eventually, “smart widgets” may automatically enhance TV viewing, says James McQuivey, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., in a paper from earlier this year. Smart widgets could “listen” to the audio track of the show being watched and offer more information about it – or even suggest a new widget you might like to download based on your interests. TV programs already carry hidden digital information identifying them.

“When all the dust settles, the entire landscape of how we watch TV will be altered,” Mr. McQuivey writes, referring to widgets. “Advertisers will have more active ways to engage TV viewers and consumers will have more ways to watch the shows they love most.”

I think that when widgets are commonplace, we will all wonder how we managed without them. Even now as i watch tv i am usually surfing the net or catching up on my emails, and this is the convenience that widgets will bring.

Incoming TV searches:

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