SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Why Web Widgets Will Invade Your TV
from the Christian Science Monitor
The Internet revolution may finally be televised. Innocuous little software applications, popularly known as "widgets," may turn out to be the back door to your TV screen that Internet companies have been waiting for.
For more than a decade, businesses have been trying to make the Internet available on the largest screen in most homes. In 1996, Time Warner offered WebTV, which failed to find an audience and folded. Even today, projects like Hewlett Packard's MediaSmart (2006) and Apple TV (2007) have yet to win over large numbers of viewers, hampered by complicated setups or limited programming choices.
Widgets promise to bring the perks of the Internet to TV screens, using a familiar remote control instead of a computer mouse. All indications are that widgets are going to "move very quickly to a great many of the TVs being sold in the next few years--if not all of them," says Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst at Parks Associates, a market research firm in Dallas that specializes in emerging consumer technologies.
Read more...
Science in the Media
Newspapers:
Magazines and Web Sites:
The Science-Media Intersection:
Subscribe to Our Content!
Visit our RSS Feeds page to choose among 13 customized feeds, or create a free My AmSci account to request an email notice whenever a specified author, department or discipline appears online.