The emerging Yahoo! TV Widgets platform is a great place to be developing right now. With such a new technology, there’s so much scope to build exciting, original and useful applications, which build on the framework provided by Yahoo! to reach an entirely new audience.

The best way to learn a new system is by building something with it. So, in anticipation of the 2009/2010 football season, and the 2010 World Cup, we decided to get stuck in with something that would have instant appeal: a Yahoo! TV Football Widget.

Teams, Leagues & Results

Our widget gives you instant access to the latest league tables, results and fixtures, so you always have the most up to date information to hand. Because of the way Yahoo! TV Widgets work as an overlay, you can access it all while you’re watching the game (or anything else for that matter). Once you’ve selected the league you want to see information about (details are available for all of the major UK leagues), you can drill down to your chosen team to find out their standings, results, and upcoming games.

Give Your Team a Widget of its Own

You don’t want to browse through all of the available leagues and teams every time you just want to find out the result of your last game. So, we added the ability to create a ‘Snippet’ in the Yahoo! TV Widgets dock, which links directly to your team’s page. You can add as many of these as you like, so if you follow more than one team, or you want to keep a close eye on the competition, keep a snippet for each one, an access them instantly. Each snippet is even colour coded with your team’s colours to make them easy to identify.

Room to Expand

The current incarnation of the widget is just the beginning. It’s been designed to be built upon, and over the course of the next 12 months we’re planning to add a lot to it. The most important event on the football calendar is of course the 2010 World Cup, and the widget will give you direct access to all the latest data, as it happens. Football news, YouTube integration and exclusive content are all in the works too, so watch this space.

We are also planning to port the widget to a number of TVs and connected devices, to reach the maximum possible market penetration. To help us do this, we are also working on a bespoke Javascript framework which will let us more easily develop cross-platform widgets. Stay tuned for more information on the Pushbutton Calcium framework soon.

A lot of people are talking about social TV at the moment, but aside from following the current trend of tagging the word ’social’ onto everything, there isn’t really a general consensus on what social TV is. There are specific applications of course – you could build a community around X Factor for example, allowing people to chat about the contestants or vote via their TV, or Virgin Media could develop a service to let anyone on their network chat through their TV  – but if your friends aren’t on Virgin, or if they’re not watching X Factor, they’re out of reach. We think there’s a lot more potential in building a service which isn’t party to a particular channel, provider, or show.

In the same way that Skype and MSN provide chat on your computer, and a variety of Facebook and Twitter apps let you access those services through your phone, Wigwam lets you chat to your friends and access your social networks directly through your TV. By building this as a standalone service, and deploying it to every connected TV platform we have access to, we’re aiming to let people experience real social TV, and be in touch with anyone else on Wigwam, regardless of who they buy their TV service from, or what channel they’re watching.

There’s a lot of potential for a service like this. The simple bits are fairly obvious – chat to your friends about what you’re watching or send a tweet about a video you just watched on MTV, but there are some less obvious ones. You could be watching one football game, and see that your mate’s watching something else – when a goal’s scored you can invite him to switch over and watch the replay with you. Or if you get bored of what’s on for the rest of the evening, you could send your friend a gift of some video on demand, and watch it together.

There are a few problems with building a service like this, and the number one problem is that people don’t like typing with their TV remote. Most remote buttons are horrible to press, or unresponsive, and on screen keyboards are very annoying to use. We’re bypassing this problem by letting people use anything else with a keyboard to to their text entry. So by deploying not just to TVs, but also iPhones, Android, Flash and the desktop, you can be watching TV, talking on Wigwam, but typing your replies into your phone. The Wigwam central server makes sure that everything stays in sync.

Another problem is that most TV and smart phone platforms currently only let you run one app at once – so if you’re in the Facebook widget you can’t be in the Twitter one. Through Wigwam you can be logged into all of those services at once, and so you don’t need to switch between every couple of minutes when you want to have a look at a different service.

At the moment we’re working on development for the first few versions of Wigwam for TV and mobile, but as we go along we’re learning a lot about developing a service that uses each of the three screens to its full potential. This is the way we see 360 development going – using the strengths of each platform properly, rather than just deploying the exact same set of functionality to each screen.

Time Capsules was Pushbutton’s prize winning entry into Microsoft’s MPF Developer Contest in 2009. The application was voted into second place in a worldwide competition which received 38 entries. Time Capsules was designed to create a new way to use IPTV to unlock the wealth of content available in archives, or give users an easy way to navigate through episodic or documentary content. Time Capsules lets users browse VOD content via a time-based interface, and find out more information about a particular piece of VOD before playing it in full screen.

Microsoft were once again impressed with Pushbutton’s pioneering and inventive use of the tools available in MPF, to create an interface which had never been seen before on the platform. The application is designed to be easily hooked up to new feeds or APIs, to let content owners quickly and efficiently create new ‘time capsules’ around any set of media or VOD assets they need to provide access to. It can also be easily re-skinned to match any desired look and feel. Time Capsules was ported to Silverlight at Microsoft’s request, to be demoed as part of a three screens cross-platform demo suite at Management America’s TMF Forum Orlando 2009. It has since been ported to Flash, iPhone and Android.