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There’s good news and bad news for Yahoo’s TV Widgets. The good news is that Sony is expanding the number of markets where those widgets are available nearly seven-fold. The bad news is that Yahoo partner Sony is also spearheading the introduction of a competing platform by Google. Yahoo announced today that its TV widgets will soon be available on Sony Bravia LCD TVs in more than 100 countries around the world, a nearly seven-fold increase over the number of markets that they are available in now. With Yahoo TV Widgets on their TVs, customers can get access to thousands of content sources for news, weather, sports and social networking, as well as over-the-top movies, TV shows and other Internet content. The only problem is that Google also wants to make Internet content available through connected TVs and other devices, and plans to do so with the help of Sony. The search giant introduced Google TV at its I/O conference last month, with Sony as its first major CE partner to introduce connected TVs and Blu-ray players that leverage the new TV operating system.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs had a lot of interesting things to say tonight at the D8 Conference. But to me, one of the most interesting topics he talked about was only brought up by a question from the audience: Apple TV. We all know that Apple considers the device a “hobby,” and tonight Jobs explained why. But he also may have tilted his hand a little bit when it comes to his thinking about this going forward. Jobs said that the Apple TV is still a hobby because there is a bad “go-to-market” strategy for such devices. In other words, this is basically what I wrote about a month ago: Apple TV will remain a hobby until Apple figures out a way to make money off of it. In the current ecosystem where subsidized cable boxes dominate, that will be very, very hard (just ask TiVo). And Jobs knows it.

Google TV has the potential to be a game-changer in the pay-TV business, by bringing web-like search navigation to traditional channel surfing, according to a new report I wrote for GigaOM Pro entitled Google TV: Overview and Strategic Analysis (subscription required). I also foresee an eventual clash between Apple’s App Store and Google’s search-based platform for supremacy on connected consumer electronics devices. I expect a slow initial ramp-up for the Android-powered Google TV devices, due to the high cost of implementation and uncertain consumer demand. The Intel Atom-based system-on-a-chip and software licensing costs are expected to add a significant premium to first-generation Google TV-enabled devices, including the Logitech set-top box and Sony HDTVs and Blu-ray players announced at the Google I/O conference. Consumer interest in surfing the web on a big-screen TV is also yet to be proved. If Google TV does prove popular with consumers, however, it could pose a highly disruptive challenge to traditional video service providers, set makers and competing TV app stores, according to the report.