Connected TV announced on August 20, 2008, at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco as the Widget Channel,[1] it integrated the Yahoo!

[2] Yahoo began porting the Konfabulator Widget Engine to an embedded Linux platform in 2007 as part of a joint venture with Intel corporation that resulted in an announcement of the Widget Channel in August 2008.

followed up with a broader announcement of distribution partnerships with major television manufacturers Samsung, Sony, LG Electronics, and Vizio,[4] with only a peripheral reference to Intel.

The following year, January 6, 2010, additional partnerships with Hisense, ViewSonic, MIPS Technologies, and Sigma Designs were announced at CES 2011 [5] bringing the Yahoo!

and the Vestel Group announced a partnership to deliver the platform that was now renamed to Yahoo Smart TV, to Europe.

Smart TV Store expanded to VIZIO in late 2012, and, as a part of this, the term "Widgets" was phased out and replaced with "Apps.

and Samsung announced an expanded partnership with the addition of support for Broadcast Interactivity.

The App Development kit required Ubuntu Linux as the default operating system, Windows developers must run the Ubuntu operating system on a virtual machine.

The store claimed to reach 135 countries, and enables widget distribution to millions of TVs from Samsung, Sony, Vizio, and Toshiba.

All transactions were processed by Yahoo!, and widget prices range from 99 cents to 99 dollars, with developers getting 70% of the revenue after taxes and currency exchange.