Toshiba to launch widget-ready TVs

Toshiba TVs will soon offer the ability to view material from the internet along with photographs, movies and music stored on external USB disk drives and memory keys.

The company announced the new products at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, saying that a new wave of home entertainment devices that do more was the result of consumer buying patterns changing because of the economic slowdown.

Toshiba has signed up Yahoo and Microsoft to its Widget Channel Framework system, which enables consumers to access a range of online services such as news, internet TV and movies on demand from their TV.

The technology is based on Microsoft's Windows Media Center and enables the new Toshiba range - which includes combined TV and DVD players and network streaming devices - to act as extenders in much the same way the Xbox 360 games console can already transfer video, music and images from a hard disk to a TV.

Toshiba's Regza range of TVs will also add two HDMI sockets for high-definition input from set-top boxes, Blu-ray players and games consoles as well as USB and SD memory card sockets.

More expensive Regza TVs will include Dolby Volume, a system that automatcally adjusts the volume when noise increases as programmes go to an advert break or the viewer changes channels.

Widget Channel Framework-enabled products are expected to be launched to US consumers first in the second half of 2009.

LG announced similar plans for TVs that can display material from the internet at an earlier press conference, adding a deal with Youtube to the Yahoo content.