TiVo To Support RealNetwork Formats

rtphokie writes: "The flurry of announcements coming form the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas has started with RealNetworks ' anouncement that it had struck deals to include its technology in an array of microchips and devices, including TiVo PVRs. This is the latest move in an effort to expand from the desktop to consumer devices."

Comments

Oh, Heavens No!

[justinstreufert]

Please, PLEASE, TiVo, stay with MPEG! The video on my TiVo looks excellent. I challenge ANYONE to show me a Real video that looks even remotely acceptable. I have never seen one. Seriously.

Justin

Re:Why?

[aonaran]

I thought that was obvious.
It's so you can download content to your Tivo to view on your TV.

They are probably thinking in terms of PPV movies.

Real, TiVo & Big Brother Databases

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Is there a possible privacy angle in this deal -- perhaps a move to combine/share Customer Viewing/Buying patterns?

Am I the only one who remembers when RealNetworks was Progressive Networks, and Rob Glazer was helping to support liberal politicsl causes?

Re:Real, TiVo & Big Brother Databases

[Lemmy Caution]

Which is painful irony. I'm sympathetic to Glaser's (nominal) ideals, but he's the poster boy for "do as I say, not as I do." If he had an ounce of self-respect, he'd clean up Real's business practices, open its technology (gee, Macromedia opened up the Flash format and they seem to be doing alright), stop his failed efforts to nickel-and-dime the desktop end-user to death, and work on a real (ha ha) business plan. I guess the silver lining is that if they can make their embedded-viewer business successful, they might start doing some of those very things.

An opportunity for Tivo

[irregular_hero]

With Tivo's stock price in the toilet and analysts wondering about Tivo's "business plan and future," it only makes sense that they would try to bring something to the table as far as "on-demand video" goes.

Tivo is hamstrung in that it has -- for most consumers who don't specifically modify the device -- only a 56K modem to get video into the device. Tivo's got to come up with something else, and darned if RealNetworks doesn't already have ready-made code that can run on Linux. What else would they choose? Microsoft's Media format?

Seems to me that Tivo needs to take a page from SonicBlue's playbook and start making broadband-capable Tivos ASAP. You might as well forget about asking me to download .rm files and display them on my Sony WEGA TV, blocks and all. Give me something a little better by sticking with MPEG and upping the connection speed. I'd pay for it.

Re:An opportunity for Tivo

[uradu]

> Seems to me that Tivo needs to take a page from SonicBlue's playbook

How about photocopy the whole damn book? Their whole business model sucks, "giving away" the player and "making money" (obviously not) off the guide fee. It only leads to people getting pissed off for being charged for 3+ guides (TiVo, DirecTV, Digital Cable etc.) They might as well give you the player for free and charge $50/mo for the TiVo logo.

It seems they could have a much more lucrative business if they built an entire accessory line around the base device. They should take at serious look at the game console market if they want to know how to make more money after selling the basic box. It's all in the expansion, stupid.

- Put in 1394 ports and sell external expansion hard drives that every moron can install w/o a kernel recompile. Sell a purple TiVo-branded 30GB 1394 HD for $200 or so, and you would actually make money off hardware. Don't limit the number of drives, and you'd be surprised how many drives you'd find in some homes.

I would bet that just offering external storage expansion alone would seriously improve their bottom line. They could easily co-brand an ADS 1394 enclosure, throw in a cheap 30GB HD--all for $60 to them, while selling it for $200 or $250.

- Add an Ethernet port and sell PC (and Mac) software that lets you manage the TiVo over the network: provide a more powerful (and quicker) version of the on-screen menus, save shows to PC for possible burning to CD/DVD, watch streaming video on multiple PCs from the TiVo etc. IOW, sell all the stuff hackers are working on anyway, while actually making money off it.

- Sell a purple TiVo-branded broadband router as a "broadband adapter" or under some other such Joe-Blow-appealing label. Take the opportunity that you're actually providing a killer app for home networking to become a major force in home networking. Become a pioneer in phoneline, powerline and wireless networking appliances.

- Otherwise expand the digital entertainment management idea that the TiVo introduced.

Instead, they're resting on their original laurels with nary any innovation since (save the DirecTiVo, if that's innovation). TiVo could have worked hard and become THE digital media company, but they pretty much paused their vision along with live TV. They remind me a lot of Palm.

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I'm still rooting for RealNetworks

[alewando]

I can't say I much like realmedia formats -- while the compression is decent, the resulting quality is not necessarily the best for the bang. Combine that with RealNetworks's history of installing spyware with realplayer, and I've never been a big fan.

Nevertheless, I'm still rooting for RealNetworks, inasmuch as they're still giving Microsoft a run for their money. It's not that I especially hate Microsoft, although I do; it's that the last thing this industry is yet another concentration of formats in the control of one corporation. Windows Media is no more or less proprietary than realmedia, but when there are two competing crappy proprietary formats, at least they're more likely to keep each other honest that way.

And thankfully, this is just another sign that RealNetworks has what it takes to continue leading in this sector. Back in April, RealNetworks negotiated a deal with AOL to bundle their software with AOL's, putting them at #1. I'm certainly not a fan of AOL, for what it's worth, but that's probably the second easiest/best way to get one's software on the desktop of millions of ordinary users, next to bundling it with Windows itself.

Now if only TiVo would stay solvent long enough for all this to make some sort of difference....

Liberalism is not really progressive

[Anonymous Coward]

The regressive, backwards-looking policies of the far left that serve only to increase the power of the rulers certainly are not "progressive". The Real company's association with poorly thought out politics is yet another reason to oppose this company.

Last time I knew, the progressive.com was taken over to sell car insurance.

Overreacting?

[mr_zorg]

I think (hope) you all are overreacting. Nowhere in the press release did I see anything about TiVo switching to Real format as its internal storage format. Nowhere did I even really see anything about using this for video, though it was mentioned that RealPlayer plays video (on the PC)... What I do read into this is that it will allow me to use my TiVo as, essentially, an MP3 jukebox. Plus the ability to download new tunes from the net or my PC. That sounds pretty cool to me...