Yahoo! Connected TV Hits 8 Million Devices… and Counting
Once you’ve seen it in action, you can’t stay away from it
And it just keeps getting bigger and smarter.
Don’t grab your tin-foil hat and head for the basement. We’re talking about Yahoo! Connected TV, a leading platform for merging Internet content with your television.
Launched in 2009, Yahoo! Connected TV offers an innovative TV-Internet experience. You can watch politicians blather on your TV and open up a Twitter app to join the running commentary on them, right there on your big screen. If you’re into fantasy football, you can watch a game, open a fantasy football app to track player stats, and taunt your rivals on a Facebook app, all from your couch.
Publishers have developed more than 140 TV apps for the platform, and that number keeps growing because Yahoo! released a widget development kit that gives any publisher the opportunity to build their own apps. And the apps keep coming, from major publishers like CBS, Showtime, USA Today, NHL and Amazon Video On Demand to entrepreneurs like iMemories, which is building specialized TV apps for uploading home videos.
Deliver content tailored to what they’re watching now…
Yahoo! is now preparing to unleash two new technologies for the Yahoo! Connected TV platform—called broadcast interactivity and device control—that will help online publishers and advertisers engage consumers more personally and immediately than ever before.
Broadcast interactivity technology automatically detects what a viewer is watching, which enables publishers and advertisers to deliver content and commercials tailored to that viewer’s interests.
Take our Yahoo! Fantasy Football fan. He or she is watching the game, tracking stats and talking trash on Facebook, when a commercial pops up on the TV offering a special on team apparel, with the option to link to more content on the teams, star players, fan blogs, and more. Content can be localized too. The nearest Pizza Hut or a neighborhood sandwich shop could offer specials on game snacks.
Television is the current heavyweight champ of advertising, with 2010 expenditures of $69 billion. But online advertising is catching up quickly, and broadcast interactivity will help. In a recent article, Ron Jacoby, chief architect and vice president of Yahoo! Connected TV, said that broadcast interactivity will help “bridge the emotion and effectiveness of television advertising with the metrics, interactivity and audience targeting of Internet advertising.”
Device control technology enables smart phones and tablets to work interactively with TVs. This opens up more creative options for publishers and advertisers to build inventory, reach wider audiences and engage consumers in new ways.
For example, if a publisher creates a long-form video, it can be offered to consumers via mobile phones and tablets, then linked to a Yahoo! Connected TV application to watch it on the big screen.
Broadcast interactivity and device control are now being piloted with strategic Yahoo! publishers like CBS, Showtime and HSN; advertisers including Ford, Microsoft, and Mattel; and device partners such as Sony, Toshiba, Haier, and D-Link. Later this year, 2011 HDTVs from Sony and Toshiba will support these capabilities; by the end of the year, a D-Link set-top media player will bring them to any model of television.
New technologies take off in 2012
But the new technologies will really take off next year, when the new Yahoo! Connected TV platform will be built into new televisions made by Sony, Samsung, Toshiba, and Vizio, and global distributors Haier, Hisense and Vestel.
There are more big things ahead for publishers and advertisers in the coming months. Yahoo! will soon roll out the Y! Connected TV Store, which its television manufacturing partners will include in their new sets later this year. Apps will be sold for 99 cents to $99, with 70 percent of the revenue going to publishers and developers. And Yahoo! is seeking advertisers to work on campaigns that leverage broadcast interactivity and device control, so they can hit the ground running when the technologies go public.
— Bob Pickard
View the original post on the Yahoo! Advertising Blog
If you click on the image up top, it takes you to a weird page. Shouldn’t it provide more info on the Lincoln widget?
It all sounds very interesting an exciting inovation.