Basically, somebody at Yahoo said 'it's like the app store!' and got the green light to write something nobody cares about.
Later in my life, I actually bought a Samsung TV with Yahoo widgets (not that that was a feature I cared about), and it was an ugly clunky GUI on top of a bunch of applications that didn't really work. Then the UI would freeze. And the app would lose its state, including your position in whatever it was playing. Also, if you turned the TV off, the app would forget everything. And nobody fixed any bugs after the first 3 months because it was an abortion of a project.
Edit: ok this is almost cool http://freetubetv.net/tvwidgets.php/ but it seems like it's taking someone else's content and delivering it to other people? That seems about as productive as https://xkcd.com/1060/