Yahoo Go for TV Goes Beta

Yahoo said Tuesday that it is testing its Go for TV software and service, designed to let users access Yahoo online services via television sets.

The Yahoo Go effort aims to meet users’ increasing demand to access Internet services from multiple devices, as the online frontier extends beyond PCs. Yahoo and competitors such as Google, Microsoft and AOL are all busy retooling their vast collections of PC-oriented online services so they can be used via mobile phones, TVs and other devices.

The Yahoo move comes a little more than a week after the Sunnyvale, Calif., company announced it had acquired most of the technology from Meedio, a maker of software that turns PCs into digital video recorders (DVRs) and digital media organizers and links them with TVs.

Yahoo Go for TV’s beta software can be downloaded for free. That website also has information about minimum PC requirements, as well as about other necessary hardware to link PCs and TVs and enable certain features like the DVR capability. Currently, the service is available only to U.S. users and limited to Windows PCs with high-speed Internet connections.

With Yahoo Go for TV, users can access, from their TVs, photo albums in the Yahoo Photo service and the Yahoo video search engine, and listen to songs and view video clips from the company’s Launchcast service. Yahoo Go for TV also can turn a PC into a DVR.

Yahoo Go for TV is part of the larger Yahoo Go strategy, announced earlier this year, to extend Yahoo’s services and content beyond the PC to other devices, including mobile phones and TVs.

For related news coverage, read Report: EBay Looks to Microsoft, Yahoo to Fight Google.

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