A few days ago, I told you that Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) is pushing Flash widgets into your living room. Before that, you saw how online content is inching its way onto the TV screen. Here, have another helping of the ongoing entertainment revolution -- courtesy of Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO).
You already knew that Yahoo! has its own "widget" platform, designed to let Web designers pull the big Y's tools and content onto their own sites. What's new today is a chorus of ringing endorsements from nearly every side of the television food chain. The "widget-based user experience" has been ported under the spiffy moniker Cinematic Internet.
Building on a partnership with Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), this widget platform gets content distributors like CBS (NYSE: CBS) and Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) all excited about new ways of presenting their material. "By pressing your remote, you can view a friend's new status on MySpace, purchase an item on eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY), or see the latest episode of your favorite CBS TV show," the company says. Less-obvious partners such as USA Today and Twitter also heap praise on the initiative, and hardware makers including Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Samsung will offer a line of Internet-connected TV sets later this year.
It is obvious that TV watching tomorrow will be very different from the DVR-shifted experience today, and miles apart from the fixed schedules of yesteryear. Yahoo! is doing the right thing here, claiming a piece of this virgin ground before industry standards and user expectations have become established. The same goes for Adobe, and I'd be surprised (in a drawn-out, lingering kind of way) if Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) didn't add its own widgetry to the mix someday soon. Heck, Facebook and MySpace have platforms of their own and could easily extend them -- but for now, at least MySpace is content just to tag along with Yahoo's solution.
Whether Yahoo! or Adobe or Google wins out in this race to supremacy, the biggest winner is the consumer. Like I said, TV viewing is becoming an interactive, connected, on-demand experience. For investors, this is prime time for new positions in the visionaries who make it all possible. The end-user market truly wants them to win, and the financial markets should follow suit.
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