On Wednesday, Intel and Yahoo announced a surprisingly broad plan to add widgets to HDTVs. When I say "surprisingly broad," it's because of all of the support the plan received: content providers (ABC, CBS), CE makers (Sony, Samsung, Toshiba), and Yahoo, of course. Just not Microsoft, which has acknowledged but not responded to my requests for comment on how this will impact its Media Center line.

While I couldn't "drive,"I had a chance to see someone else play around with the system, which is already up and running; for you to buy it, however, you'll either need the Intel designed "Menlow" platform built into a new TV, or a set-top box that should cost less than $200. The system appeared rather robust and definitely functional, although the number of widgets was limited.

More to the point, it's pretty. Yahoo designed an attractive GUI, whose only drawback is that it distracts a bit from the television content. By default, the "dock," as Yahoo refers to it in Apple-speak, appears as a ticker tape of functional blocks at the bottom of the screen. Yahoo allows the video to be resized and pushed up, so tuning in to CNBC, for example, might yield a whole series of ticker strips. Each widget, in docked mode, was referred to as a "snippet".

(PC Magazine has more pictures of what the Intel-Yahoo widget service looks like here.)

By default, it appears that all users share the same GUI. There appears to be some room for personalization, although how that will work isn't exactly clear. Parents can input a PIN to block out restricted content.

Three widgets were up and running: a stock/finance news application, Flickr, and Twitter. A fourth, video-on-demand from Blockbuster, played back just a few trailers that were cached, I believe.

Clicking a widget (or "snippet") opened up a sidebar -- which, as the name suggests, was a vertically oriented bar that obscured the left fifth or so of the screen. The sidebar essentially is a workspace, where the snippet can open up and display more information.

In the sidebar mode, for example, Flickr opened up and presented thumbnails of the pictures the user had stored on the site. (Natually, adding a widget allows the option of logging in.)

Twitter was demonstrated in a press preview, and worked just about how'd you expect. What I didn't notice was an alert in snippet mode to alert you to new Tweets. In sidebar mode, however, tweets popped up in real time, and the short character limit enforced by the service worked very well in the limited real estate a TV offered. However, the control mechanism was a traditional remote, and I didn't see any means to actively enter Tweets, just view them.

The stock application also worked as expected: stock information at the top, and relevant news headlines down at the bottom.

The Yahoo-Intel display included a number of snippets that were present, but not functional. Probably the most interesting were the video-on-demand applications which apparently will work somewhat like the Sezmi set-top box, routing video-on-demand from content providers to your TV screen. (Sezmi says they'll launch by the end of the year, and has also identified broadband providers, such as Comcast, as potential partners.)

That last bit makes me wonder. Among the Intel-Yahoo partners is Comcast, and I can't see them allowing a third-party widget to control the look, feel, and access to a content provider's own VOD service, when Comcast's own VOD is set up to make Comcast money. I suspect, after talking to the Intel employees manning the booth, that Comcast will be allowed to do what they want on boxes they provide, but that consumers would be free to go out and purchase their own box and download the widgets that they want.