Yahoo/Samsung Roll Out New Brainwave – WebTV

Someone tries WebTV at least once every six months. Yahoo!/Samsung being the most recent. Its a shame to see companies wasting money on convergence projects such as this. Apple, Microsoft et al have all had a go in their past, but the problem is very fundamental, intricate and complicated. It requires a company with guts, intelligence, an ability to create new standards for both industries (web and TV), and above all lots of time and lots and lots of patience.

The J/V will release InfoLive a service that provides news, finance and weather information from Yahoo!. The question begs, to the product managers for things like this. Why? Why create something that is not needed? who NEEDS finance information on their TV? Weather info yes, but CeeFax had that covered 20 years ago. OK you may say “the information available via the internet is more granular and requires a more sophisticated UI than Ceefax” – a querty keyboard and a monitor is fine for this. And since people have laptops now, and will happily sit in front of the TV with a laptop (that has no UI limitations) I really do not see what NEED this product is addressing.

Yahoo! has not learned anything from Google at all. They live in a web world, not a push media one.