You’ve been hearing for years that your TV isn’t just your computer’s dumb cousin. That all it needs is the right education to bring it up to par. Yet you’re still waiting. Well, we’re starting to hand out full-ride scholarships for your flatscreen.

This week, Samsung debuted a smart new TV, the 46-inch LED TV 7000 that features the first implementation of the Yahoo! TV Widgets. I know what you’re saying — I’ve tried that TV-Web mashup thing before. This time it’s different. You’ll find a dock at the bottom of your screen that features a number of customizable widgets for content like Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Weather, Flickr and other great content coming soon. It won’t interrupt your television programming, so you can call up your stock portfolio while watching a baseball game or check for the latest headlines during a slow part of that PBS documentary. It’s multitasking with a vengeance.

But these widgets aren’t limited to Yahoo! content. Since we’ve opened the API to developers, anyone can build a widget, which you can easily download from the Widget Gallery, not unlike an app store. Soon you will be able to add widgets for Twitter, the New York Times, Netflix, eBay, CBS Sports, Showtime and MySpace (just to name a few) to your dock. Perhaps coolest of all, you can access video content through these widgets — so, for example, Blockbuster onDemand movies can stream right from the web to your TV screen. All this with just your remote.

Samsung is first out the door, but TVs and devices from Sony, LG Electronics, Intel, and VIZIO will follow, featuring the Yahoo! Widget Engine beginning this summer.

Since seeing is believing, check out this video demo from Connected TV VP Patrick Barry. Then read the review in the WSJ’s Mossberg Solution.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor