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TiVo, MS, and the War for the Living Room
r-blo writes "Hot off his in-depth comparison of TiVo vs. Microsoft Media Center, Engadget has Thomas Hawk following up with ten things each that TiVo and Microsoft need to do to win the War for the Living Room. It won't be easy (like TiVo offering their OS as software for the PC. Not going to happen.) but I've got a feeling they might be better off listening up. Especially TiVo, since we're all rooting for them anyway."
Number one for both is easy - establish partnerships with cable / satellite companies.
TiVo is ahead here thanks to DirecTV but that is looking sketchy since DirecTV's NDS subsid. has DVR technology of their own. POD, cablecard, and other open standards aren't even off the ground yet.
Within two years both TiVo and (especially) MS will be trailing in marketshare to cable-delivered boxes (Digeo's Moxi, Motorola 620x, SA Explorer 8k) with built-in conditional access.
Think no upfront investment, no change in service, and ten bucks a month.
Pity for TiVo - thanks to the brand recognition, people will be recording their shows with box XYZ and still saying "haven't watched it yet, but TiVo'ed it so don't tell me."
Overall I thought the article was pretty good, but I feel it was off on a few points. I'll admit I own a TiVo, so I am going to focus more on them since I am familiar with the device/service.
MicrosoftPoint 2: The article suggests 4 tuners, but how many should be recordable at one time? The HDTV TiVo unit can only record from any two tuners at a time. Does anyone know if current hard disks could handle two HD streams and two analog streams? I think this is the reason why TiVo only allows recording on two of the 4 tuners in their HD model at any given time.
TiVoPoint 2: TiVo has already announced "TiVoToGo" which will implement what the article is requesting. It is scheduled for release this fall. The reason the ports are disabled on the Hughes model is because of DirecTV - not TiVo. TiVo has stated many times that if they had things their way, the DirecTV models would have all the features the standalone models do.
Point 3: I'm not really sold on needing a DVD burner in every unit if you can download the files to a PC to burn them to DVD like the author wants in the second point. If I have a DVD burner in my PC, I would rather not have to pay for another in my TiVo. I think the units should be available, but I don't think they should all be forced to have them.
Point 4: The HDTV unit from TiVo will almost surely have the Home Media Features and TiVoToGo. Again, the only reason the DirecTV HDTV unit does not is because DirecTV wants it that way for whatever reason.
Point 7: It might be a great idea to offer an external USB 2.0 add-on that you could use for simply holding media that has been already recorded. Meaning the TiVo still records to the internal hard disk, and manages everything like it always has, but you can copy a show to the external disk to free space on the internal disks. This saves TiVo from some tough questions (are the USB 2.0 ports fast enough for direct recording, how to handle if someone yanks the drive in the middle of a recording, which shows get stored where, etc), but still allows folks to get the additional space they need.
Point 9: I think TiVo's acquisition of Strangeberry will help implement features like these. Business 2.0 has an article right now that talks about what the Strangeberry purchase is bringing to the table for TiVo. Link to cut/paste of article (Business 2.0 is non-free/registration).
Tivo should consider making business and selling their machines in Europe, Asia^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the rest of the world too. The War in the Living Room is not only in North America. Is it?
Anyway, in Europe, AFAIK, it's too late. It has been a long wait for such Tivo-like products, but from now on the market exists here for 2 years.
Mayfoev [Damn Frenchy]