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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!
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.
I have used both. Ultimate TV has the nice feature of being able to record two shows at once. And I like the grid style tv guide better. But Tivo is GREAT with suggestions, and the season pass manager is the best of all of the PVRs out there. Letting you set up conflicting season passes makes life WAY easier to get the shows you always want, and fill in the gaps with other shows.
If tivo added a second tuner, it would rock my world.
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.
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.
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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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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!'
The DirectTiVo does have dual tuners now. They have been sending the upgrade out for the past month or so. The standalone Tivo's will never have dual tuner capability unless they release a new unit with two encoders. The standalone are not really comparable to UltimateTV as they server a different market.
Q.
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
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)
I only have a TiVo, and I'm not positive I'm talking about TiVo vs. UTV here, or mixing some of these up with TiVo vs. ReplayTV. Sorry.
Yes, he posts on a lame non-slash web BBS type thing once in a while. I think he is DrStrange. He has three TiVos, a Replay, and a UTV. He does balanced reviews (tells you what each unit is best for, not just what TiVo does well). I looked for the exact post, but couldn't find it. If I had I would have skipped doing my own list.
[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".
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!).