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TiVo Gets In Deeper With Sony
mickeyreznor writes: "TiVo and Sony have entered into a seven year deal. The deal will result in TiVo's software being incorporated into Sony's electronic products. This deal might be good for TiVo, who've seemed to have been struggling financially to date. I'll just have to see how much more sony products cost with TiVo included." This is good news for anyone with a TiVo.
Coming in 2005... The Playstation ThreeVo!
Besides most of you hating M$, how do most people view the two competitors.. I know TiVo is more expandable with the HD space and all, but is it better than Ultimate TV? Anyone had/used both and can give us an honest opinion?
"This is where god would go if he wanted to get off blow!"
On another note, Tivo just released a software update for its stand alone recievers. It allows users to store more content on their boxes by using VBR. Cool stuff.
How long until Sony puts restrictions on recording Sony Studio's movies bought using pay-per-view? or on HBO and the like?
While I think the competition will be good (Microsoft is competing in this realm, etc.) I'm not sure I'm going to like the influence Sony will have from a copyright perspective.
See if you can find a 20 hour TiVo, I think certain Walmarts still had them and they were only like 149 bucks (maybe less), then throw a 100 gig HD in there and rock on with your like 100 hours TiVo.
Just what I was wondering. Sony is heavily involved in the content providing business as well as the hardware to play the content on business. Sounds like it'll just increase the likelyhood of copy controls being introduced in future versions of the Tivo software and hardware. I want something that's tied to no one's desires but mine. (Able to work with lots of different program listing services, lots of different file formats, easy to transfer files to and from other devices, easy to write your own control software for, easy to expand storage, etc.)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Looks like they really want to concentrate on the software/service side of the house. Interesting, but doesn't it make them even more of a Microsoft target?
I'm hoping this agreement will let manufacturers do things (recording to digital media) that TiVo wouldn't do for itself otherwise.
Sony had to do this because you know MS will merge the X-box and ReplayTV in the next few years. I'm suprised TiVo wasn't bought out completely by Sony. At what point does the web and/or and ethernet card get built in also, creating the ultimate All-in Wonder.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
Since the TiVo service isn't available in Canada AFAIK, I'd just like a nice standalone PVR. I don't want it to "learn" what I like, I don't want to archive everything away so I can share it on LimeWire, I don't want frills. All I want is a digital VCR replacement for time-shifting programs.
When I want to archive things (like movies or The Family Guy) I'll stick to VHS because I can share those with friends, and there's that whole backwards compatibility thing.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
For one thing, it means that TiVo is likely to stay in business for quite sometime. A TiVo recorder would be lot less useful if there no company providing the update service that TiVo provides. The updates give you schedule listings and software upgrades. Without the update service, a TiVo recorder is only slightly more useful than a VCR - with the update service a TiVo recorder becomes indespensible to most people who have used one.
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If we want TiVo to stay around (which means becoming profitable (again?)), then they are going to have to make such strategic partnerships. Sony is a good choice for TiVo, and Sony obviously sees the possibilities TiVo has to offer.
As for price increases in Sony products, I do not think you'll see much (if any). The kicker is the subscription fee. But the point of this kind of relationship is that Sony has the market base for TV's, DVD's, etc... and once people have these devices in their home which are "TiVo ready" then it makes it realy easy for them to dial the 800 number to subscribe. Buying an extra "box" (at $300 a pop) is not worth it to some people. Having the "extra features" in a box they are already buying is a good thing!
It just becomes a fairly standard digital "vcr" if you don't have the service.
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Also, Palm (n): See 3Com.
Are there better resources out there than http://linuxvideo.org?
I like the functionality of the TiVo, but I don't want to spend the money on one - I don't need anything but a way to decode & record a cable TV signal.
Why? Because the TiVo can't be programmed from the office, and I can't move anything off the TiVo to store for later viewing. I've already got 150+ GB of available storage, I need to use it for something.
'ARRGH! Pirate Designers of the Internet, we be!'
Ultimate TV only supports satellite. It doesn't have MPEG-2 encoding capability, it simply stores the MPEG-2 stream from the satellite on the Hard Disk. This is exactly what kept me away from Ultimate TV; I use Digital Cable service because of the many televisions in my house (DirecTV charges $5 extra per TV, my cable company doesn't). Additionally, I am tied to my cable company because I use a cable modem, which I am very happy with.
/.er should ever consider.
So, Ultimate TV is positively worthless to me. Also, the capability to record two shows at once requires two drops from the satellite, something which a lot of people didn't think to pull behind their televisions.
The only other feature Ultimate TV boasts is a WebTV add-on, something which no serious
To tell you the truth, I'm unsure what to think about this. On the one side, this is going to be a big boost for TiVo's publcity, but on the other I'm concerned with how Sony is going to use TiVo's license(copyright controls?).
I am surprised though that Sony just didn't buy out TiVo. Maybe that is a good sign.
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
It's interesting that those who deliver the content (cable, satellite providers) and those who deliver the hardware we use to view the content (Sony, TiVo) are finding new and revenue-generating ways (HDTV, digital cable/sat, PVRs) to give their customers what they want (quality picture and sound, flexibility in viewing times), but those who actually PRODUCE the content seem to be doing the same thing they've been doing all along (producing generally low-quality stuff and relying mostly on ad revenues). Is there any way for technology to have a positive influence on the stuff we watch instead of just the way in which we watch it?
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
If it had a web interface for scheduling record times, and ethernet. Oh, and a phone jack, so I could plug it into the wall for nothing but video overlay of callerid info..no dialup crap. I just want the callerid displayed on my tv without having to buy more expensive crap or hack something together myself. An email checker video overlay would be pretty spiffy too.
Tivo was (hopefully still is) very supportive of the hacking being done to their STBs. They were highly amused that people were ripping them apart and adding bigger hard drives. Hopefully Sony will continue to honor the stance that Tivo had taken.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
I'd be perfectly happy to continue clicking on the programs I want from my regular listing, and to have the ability to set it to recortd the same time & station each week. I suppose this deal is a step in that direction, but unless sony makes boxes that let you do that, it doesn't help much.
hawk
hawk
Ok, with apologies to the "Digital Hub" idea of SJ.
Give it some serious thought for a second. If Sony could take ILink/Firewire and ethernet, then add it to a Tivo, or Tivo-like device, it would make a killing, IMO.
A rather nebulous idea, to be sure, but one time I was being rather lazy and needed some images I had snagged...for lack of a zip disk, and rather than emailing them to myself or ftp'ing I simply dragged the images to a digital camera and it had put them on the memory card inside.
Very neat and simple. A device that does what you want w/o any restrictions, encryption, access denied, backdoors, product activation.
Drag, Drop, copy, done. (I hesitate to say I was on a mac, so no flames, pls)
Imagine this applied to a PVR. You've got a dvd/SVCD/VCD/mpg/avi/mov or heck maybe even mp3's for good measure. You drag, drop or pipe it over a wire and it plays by either decoding it or accepting a straight DV stream.
Not only would the coolness factor be a driving force, but the MP|RI-AA "FSCK OFF" factor would make them fly off the shelves.
It could be done by SONY and very few others because SONY, unlike most corporations can, have "someone to point a finger at".
MSFT == gates/ballmer
APPL == jobs
SONY == (I have no idea).
This is what most corps are aiming for, mind you.
Yeah there would be other corps screaming bloody murder, maybe suing, but (IIRC) Sony or a Sony like company would defend itself from the likes of Rambus/MSFT/MPAA. (Was it Sony?...don't remember and too dang tired to look it up, anywho..).
I think, it is a possibility...some corps "get it" when they 'give ppl what they want' *not* "give ppl what they think we want'".
One Moose's opinion.
Moose
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
It's good because the long-term viability of TiVo, Inc. was very much in doubt without a deal like this. I, for one, like my TiVo and would like it to continue to dial-up and get programming data for a few more years. If TiVo, Inc. goes belly up, my TiVo becomes a big paper weight.
Anyway, the market seems to think it's a good thing for TiVo... stock is up about 23% today.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Upgrading a Tivo is nowhere that simple, and some people experience problems after an upgrade that non-upgraders never have.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
The biggest drawback I see to this argument is dealing with upgrades. While much can be done via software upgrades, the hardware sometimes needs to be changed to add features.
;) comes out 6 months later. Do you buy a new TV/Tivo unit? Do you disable the internal Tivo and opt to purchase a stand alone? Or do you just make due with what you have (not likely for me!)
What if you where to add $300 to the price of your TV with a built in Tivo and a new version (with 12 tuners
I like the idea of seperate components. If my DVD player dies and I have to do without it for awhile or send it to the shop, I can still watch my TV.
load "linux",8,1
I actually made another similiar response, but I want to make sure this is clear. There is no way Sony would introduce content control functions into Tivo unless it was done industry wide. This market is too competitive. If someone knew that if they bought a Tivo the "Transfer to Tape" function would be disabled for all Sony Media, but if they bought a ReplyTV or MS UltimateTV they wouldn't have this restriction, nobody would buy them.
Am I wrong? How could they get away with it? Now if they had a monopoly (like some people) they probably could, but they don't.
load "linux",8,1
[reduced version of an essay I have yet to rewrite]
Why is TiVo so delicious? Especially for a game console manufacturer who wants to adopt services? The answer is simple. The DVR locks itself into your television experience as a layer between your remote and your programming. How so?
Once you have a TiVo/UltimateTV/ReplayTV, you are always working within the software environment. That is, it is not like a game console where you say, "Now I am going to play video games. Okay. Now I am done. I am going to switch it off and watch TV." The DVR is an always-on computer television appliance. It does a good job of integrating itself into the television... people without TiVos don't think about turning their TiVo off to do something else. [How? The primary reason is that it takes over the remote control. If you can get people to use YOUR remote control to operate their home television with YOUR appliance, you can put anything in between that you want.]
Match that with a game console, and online services, and you see why it is so attractive. An online service that is "always on" makes itself far more easier to adopt than something you turn off and on.
This is the future and, for this reason, television computing will become pervasive. WebTV isn't it. Game consoles aren't it. It is the DVR which will allow companies to sink their services into the "home television computer".
Sony (minimally) releases a Playstation 2 Linux kit.
....
Sony commits to a seven year deal with the Linux Based Tivo.
I suspect Sony will start shipping Dual boot Laptops and PCs soon where the user will have to buy windows or it gets wiped off.
I suspect the Playstation 3 will run linux! You scoff, but with Sony's experience.... It would probably be a seriously modified kernel with many patches that would never see an AC let alone LT release but....
Imagine a PS3 with DVD-R(W), TIVO, FIREWIRE, USB, KDE/OpenOffice and Mozilla (use debs please sony and make it deb compatible as far as possible), do you want all those idiots who want a computer to go out and get one of them or a Dell box with Win9x/Me/XP/BS and then ask you how to
I think Sony are just plain ahead of the game here , and the consumer computer market is about to be redefined (finally) for the first time since win3.x.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
If you set up a computer to be a Tivo replacement, you are still spending money on it. The computer very likely costs more than a Tivo. You have to realize that while it is recording, it's essentially useless for doing anything else on. And a Tivo always records, so you getthe live buffer.
And you'll end up with a much less useful software and fewer features. I know they seem like sillt luxuries untill you've tried them, but they become indispensible very soon.
I don't mean to be nasty or anything, but your idea is flawed because it doesn't appreciate how Sony makes money out of the PlayStation.
In 1998, an astonishing 40% of Sony's profits came from its PSX division. And they made next to no money on the hardware. The company makes money because publishing a PSX game requires Sony's approval. Oh, that and a $5-7 fee (per unit) to Sony.
Going to a Linux distribution with a DVD player would mean ANYONE could make a PS3 game. Good news for PS3 owners, bad news for Sony. Why would anyone pay Sony money when they could sell the games for 'free'.
While Sony would love to be 'free' of Microsoft, that does not mean they would like to make the creation of games free. Going to an open-source/Linux architecture would mean ANYONE could write games.
I can't imagine Sony senior management would go for that.
Just my ha'penny's worth.
--- My dad's political betting
If TiVo goes out of business, the tape will be pulled off a lot of mouths. There are no secrets inside there. Once there's no longer a threat of lawyers (or killing the company), a lot of previously guarded utilities will surface -- feeding them guide data is not hard at all.
So get a DirectTV unit. It requires almost zero interaction with TiVo to function. With a few minor modifications, it never needs to call tivo. Sure, you'll stop getting "TiVolution Magazine" and "Showcases", but how often does anyone use those?
TiVo has pretty much zero idea this is happening unless it is announced ahead of time soon enough to get into the guide data.
One of the things TiVo normally does is not re-record things that it has recorded in the last 28 days -- some exceptions apply, the big two are if you ask it to record an episode ("The Red Badge Of Gayness") rather then all episodes of a show ("South Park"), and suggestions don't count as recorded (except maybe if you watch them).
After the 9/11 thing TiVo sent out a patch that basically said that anything recorded that week can be re-recorded even within the 28-day rule. That let most of the stuff that was bumped a week or two get recorded anyway (that was nice because I just made a low priority wish list for first-run-only "Pilot" and caught the first episode of most shows that I could work into my schedule).
It is far from perfect here, the address this week threw everything off, I "fixed it" by setting a manual recording for a big block of time. Fortunitly I knew that one ahead of time and could plan for it.
It turns out that Seinfeld on some random channel that TiVo finds it on for me is now getting preempted by baseball, and worse yet the same episode is on another channel a few hours later, and is not being recorded because of the 28 day rule (which I swear is normally a really useful thing!). I ended up using the Recording History to find another show that is on at the same time that I would like to record (but less then Seinfeld), and bumped it's priority up. So now I get Northern Exposure, and a real Seinfeld later.
Apparently TiVo is working on a thing that can be slapped in the VBI that says "this show is running late" and some other stuff. If the networks choose to use it, and use it correctly that could help a lot. The UK apparently has one of these, and some stations don't use it right, so I'm not sure how it will work out here.
Of corse without TiVo I wouldn't even get Seinfeld, or Northern Exposure. They are on at bad times, plus I'm not always in the mood to watch them. So now TiVo gets them, and if I feel like watching them before they roll off my buffer (about a week) I get too.
Things like the presidents address are uncommon, but somewhat worse with TiVo since you get into the habit of ignoring schedules (since TiVo really does handle 99.8% of things well!).