Yahoo! Announces Launch of Yahoo! Go TV
By NEWS RELEASE |
January 6th, 2006
Comments (1)
Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet company, today announced the upcoming launch of Yahoo! Go TV, a new product that will bring the power and depth of the Internet to the PC-connected television screen. Yahoo! Go TV will seamlessly bring consumers’ community, as well as content such as digital photos, movie playtimes at local theaters and other personalized Yahoo! services onto the PC-connected television experience.
The new service will allow consumers to take content from their personal computer or from the web and extend it onto the biggest screen in their home. Yahoo! Go TV integrates consumers Internet services, including video search and photos, into the television. Yahoo! will also look to make the company’s music offerings available through this new service. Yahoo! Go TV will also improve consumers’ ability to navigate and find all the content available on their television. For example, consumers will be able to use their remote control to see what’s playing at their local theater or share pictures from a recent vacation with friends, all on their television screen.
The company expects to launch Yahoo! Go TV in the coming months.
“Yahoo! Go TV integrates the home television viewing experience with the leading Internet services that tens of millions of consumers already know and depend on,” said Marco Boerries, senior vice president, Connected Life, Yahoo!. “This is about making Internet technology work for people in their daily lives. We want to give consumers everything they love about the web — the open platform and the ability to find and view what they want, when they want it — on their PC-connected television.”
Key features currently planned for the new Yahoo! Go TV service include:
Yahoo! Video Search
- Quickly search, find and view Internet videos using Yahoo!’s industry leading video search technology
- Yahoo! Photos and Flickr
- View personalized photo slide shows on the television
- Access images saved on Yahoo! Photos or the local hard drive
- Easily find and view friends’ albums shared online
My Yahoo!
- Access to personalized information and services
Yahoo! Movies
- Search for playtimes at local theaters or watch movie trailers
- Find movies from the DVR, television or DVD player
Yahoo! TV
- Full Personal Video Recorder (PVR) functionality, including trick play features and access to the PC for storage of content
- Full TV tuning capabilities to control your TV channels
Yahoo! Go TV will be available to consumers through an easy to install, lightweight and downloadable application that will run on any PC connected to a TV and work with any remote control. To learn more about Yahoo! Go TV consumers can go to: http://go.yahoo.com/go.
About Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide. Yahoo! seeks to provide online products and services essential to users’ lives, and offers a full range of tools and marketing solutions for businesses to connect with Internet users around the world. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
January 7th, 2006 at 1:53 am
I was at the Yahoo! tent and got to see Go TV in action. Wow. This thing looks alot like Media Center in a lot of ways. It records TV with a TV Tuner. It lets you see slide shows of all your photos *AND* almost full screen slide shows of your Flickr photos, favorites, friends, etc. (I say almost because there is a little purple Yahoo! bar at the bottom of the screen when doing full screen slide shows but the Yahoo! rep I spoke with said that this will be able to be minimized away in a future version. It allows you access to Yahoo! music services or your own mp3 library. It allows you to see movie trailers and theater info near you from Yahoo! Movies (not in high def yet). It allows you to see a bunch of long tail video including a service that ranks the top 10 or so videos each day and highlights those on a main page. You can also search for long tail video content but I was told that there are no RSS feed or RSS search feed capibilities yet.
And it works on any Media Center or XP Windows PC.
Like I said, Wow. From seemingly out of nowhere. And the price? FREE. I’m sure somebody’s going to need to pay for all that bandwidth from those high res full screen Flickr slide shows (and it’s probably not Flickr with a $25 per year subscription). My guess is that this is more an added feature to pull you in to all the content where advertising and things like music subscription services pay for the feature.