It's a safe bet that watching TV is eventually going to feel more like using the Web -- at least for those who want it to. But once people go through the hassle of hooking up their TVs to the Internet, will they settle for small, watered-down parts of the Internet on their TVs?
That's basically what the new TV widget platform by Yahoo and Intel seems to be promising. And there's nothing wrong with that, as long as it's unintrusive and doesn't crash our TV set.
But in order to use it, we're going to have to do something we've never done before: Hook our Internet up to our TV set. This won't be too tricky -- our home router sits near the tube, and we figure most broadband-connected homes now have a wifi network that the TV can connect to.
But once we've connected our TV to the Web, is a widget channel what we'll really want to use it for? It seems more likely that we'd want to watch more TV -- from the Internet -- on our TV, like Netflix and Amazon streams, out-of-town games on MLB.TV, on-demand Hulu shows, or even episodes of Diggnation.
So the bigger question: Will Yahoo and Intel's platform -- and the TVs that it ships on -- be able to deliver that kind of experience -- either through widgets or a Web browser? Or will it just leave us wanting more?
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