Sony And Yahoo!7 Pushing IPTV On New Bravia TVs

 title=This morning, Sony unveiled its upcoming lineup of TVs for the first half of this year. There are 26 new TVs hitting shelves over the course of this year, 21 of which will feature an internet connection for IPTV. While that’s exciting enough in itself, the bigger news is that they’ve partnered with Yahoo!7 to deliver content from Channel 7 directly to the Bravia TV.

Included in the list of 18 Channel 7 programs that will be available directly from the Bravia TV are 30 Rock, Border Security, City Homicide, Heroes, Sunrise and Seven News. As time goes on, you’d expect more programs to be added as well.

In addition to the Yahoo!7 partnership, there will also be content from 14 other channels, including SBS, Billabong, YouTube, Wired, Golflink, eHow, Epicurious, Blip, Podcasts and Style.com. In the future, Sony are planning on adding pay per view movies and content as well.

And on top of content, there will also be widgets from Yahoo!, like weather, news, and Flickr, plus Facebok and Twitter widgets for selected models. And to push Sony’s World Cup partnership, there will also be a FIFA World Cup 2010 countdown widget. Accessing all of this content will be through the TV’s XMB UI.

The implementation is really easy to use. At the moment, there’s only 15 individual episodes of shows available, but considering that the TVs aren’t actually for sale yet, that’s not a big issue. Sony have also said that they’re talking with other networks and content providers to improve the service, and we’re likely to see that content arrive later this year.