Yahoo’s seeking some additional expansion through apps. What else? The company’s Yahoo Connected TV is now available on several new models Toshiba HDTV’s, including the WX800 Cinema Series(R) 3D LED. Viewers will have an interactive app market for accessing movie and television content from Yahoo’s network, directly through their televisions.

“Yahoo! is reaching consumers wherever they view content — on mobile devices, PCs, tablets, and TV — and partnering with Toshiba enables us to deliver a rich variety of Internet content to the living rooms of millions more people,” said Ron Jacoby, vice president, Connected TV, Yahoo! Inc. “With worldwide sales of all Internet-enabled TVs expected to rise to more than 87 million units by 2013, Yahoo! is focused on expanding the reach of Yahoo! Connected TV and ensuring the best Internet-connected TV experience for our consumers, publishers, and developers.”

For Yahoo, the efforts towards gaining access points to reach consumers have been widespread, spanning mobile devices, search deals with Microsoft and improvements around social media integration. Yahoo recently updated its Mail and Messenger tools, and has partnered with services like Zillow to enhance its own content hubs. Despite these steps, Yahoo was still overtaken by Microsoft’s Bing, marking a precedent for the search entities.

For Toshiba, it’s increasingly important for the electronics manufacturer to remain relevant in this era of media and device convergence. The company is incorporating such app portals as standard options, while also looking to the tablet market to gain relevancy through the Android platform.

Yet these kinds of developments from media and manufacturing companies stand to really fragment the app market, in terms of delivery, access, portability and platform support. Verizon’s recently announced V Cast Apps store is another example of this trend, as the marketplace will have exclusive apps and compete with the Android Market to some extent.

We’ll eventually see more standardized platform implementations for media and other apps, with virtualization methods making it easier for developers to create singular apps for a device-agnostic approach. That will be a milestone for the industry, as it will also lead to advertisement standardization, app integration and more direct access to consumers.