Articles even appeared in regular press and exposed the idea to the general public. Now the first TVs are beginning to appear with web widget support. In the UK for example, the Samsung LE40B650 HDTV is available and supports web widgets.
There are several possible widget providers of course. Yahoo is probably the best known and offers widgets such as YouTube, Twitter and Flickr. However, according to this review, only Flickr was available at the launch of the Samsung TV in the UK.
Chumby also has a widget solution that has been put on TVs. The image below shows the widgets.
And here we see the first problem with widgets: many are not designed for TV viewing. The widgets are barely readable unless they occupy a good proportion of the screen which in many cases defeats the purpose of having widgets.Widgets have other problems too. One obvious issue is that the TV or set top box must be connected to the internet. Many homes do not have the internet next to the television, in which case a wi-fi dongle may need to be purchased which in the case of the Samsung is about 50 UK pounds. In addition the widget engine and widgets themselves can be quite large. The amount of memory (a few hundred kilobytes for each widget) may not be excessive for TVs but could be for STBs, especially if the widgets are stored locally from session to session.
Another problem could be that the widgets may not be completely safe and may cause the platform to crash, depending on the quality of the implementation of the widget environment.
Nontheless, the interest is such that widgets seem an inevitable addition to the range of DTV offerings and many of the problems will be overcome in time. My own company (Alticast) offers GEM based widgets as a platform which helps to ensure a more integrated and stable solution. Probably Alticast widgets are most useful for operators who wish to control their own widgets, and the solution can also run alongside other widget solutions such as that from Yahoo.
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