Yahoo Smart TV

» see connectedtv.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the widget layer on the back of my tv was never going to be my computing surface. in 2009 i was finishing my comp eng degree on a laptop, the tv in our flat in ankara was a regular ccd-tube without a network port. yahoo connected tv was a thing being shown at ces in las vegas to retail buyers from samsung and lg, a long way from what i was actually using a screen for.

the platform debuted ces january 2009 as yahoo widget engine for tv. yahoo had acquired konfabulator in 2005 for the desktop widget framework. konfabulator on the desktop was small javascript-and-xml-based widgets that floated over windows or os x. yahoo took that engine, retargeted it for the slow embedded chips inside 2008-vintage smart tvs, signed deals with samsung and lg and vizio and sony to preinstall the platform on the next generation of network-capable sets.

the pitch was that you would press a button on the remote and a strip of widgets would slide up along the bottom of the screen over whatever cable show was playing. a weather widget, a yahoo finance ticker, a flickr slideshow, the local news headlines. the tv stayed the primary surface, the widgets were ambient. in 2009 this read as the future. in 2015 it read as the past.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it shipped ~

samsung's internet@tv brand was the largest deployment, around 2009 to 2012 every mid-tier samsung lcd that retailers stocked in europe and north america had yahoo widgets in the firmware. lg used the same engine on its 2010-2012 nettv generation. vizio rolled it across the via internet apps brand. sony shipped it on the bravia line. the developer story was the konfabulator widget format documented in 2005, ported to a tv-friendly remote-control input model.

the widget store opened to the public 2009. yahoo took developer signups, accepted submissions in the konfabulator format, vetted them for tv-screen layout compliance. small apps like a netflix queue browser or a twitter ticker shipped through that pipeline. yahoo wrapped the model in a connected-tv marketing push, the manufacturers used it as the smart-tv differentiator in their next-quarter retail decks.

~ what killed it ~

google tv arrived 2010 with sony and logitech hardware. samsung's own tizen platform launched 2014 as a smart-tv replacement for the yahoo widget layer on its own sets. lg pivoted to webos after acquiring it from hp in 2013. the tv manufacturers had each picked their own stack by 2015, the yahoo widget engine no longer had a reason to exist as the cross-brand standard.

march 30 2018 yahoo announced no new konfabulator-based widgets would be accepted. existing widgets could still get updates, html5-based apps were unaffected. the platform drifted dormant through the verizon ownership years and the 2021 apollo acquisition. september 30 2025 the final shutdown notice took the backend offline. any tv set still showing the yahoo widget strip that day stopped pulling data permanently. seventeen years from the ces unveil to the dead backend.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »