Yahoo Unveils Partners for Web TV at CES

Yahoo announced major partnerships with television manufacturers: Sony, LG, Samsung, and Vizio. Under the deal announced today at CES, Yahoo’s web platform will be integrated within television. Yahoo branded services and applications can be accessed while you’re watching television. The applications, mainly widgets to start, would reside alongside television shows and would remain as a means to complement (not replace) television programming.

So imagine watching the Wall Street headlines on CNN and getting instant access to company profiles and charts per Yahoo Finance… or watching the Travel Network and making new connections with people that have been to Peru, your next travel spot. For big sports fans such as myself, watch Monday Night Football (NFL) while beside it, tracking your Yahoo Fantasy team points.

If Yahoo is successful and can lead and open up the way for web applications to converge with television, a whole new Industry can follow in its coat tails. New start-ups would spawn to build widgets and other useful applications for television. Similar to widgets for social networks (per a Clearspring or Slide.com), there would be new applications that make the television viewing experience more social, interactive, collaborative, share-able, and most importantly, more entertaining!

It also creates new business models for existing web application developers:  Companies that rely on advertising revenues and are currently limited to the web only can now distribute their widgets (with clients’ advertising) on CNN, the Travel Network, and Monday Night Football!

New agencies, ad networks, and services companies will also be born around the new TV-Applications Industry.