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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."
Good article. It's amazing what happens when you actually read it!
However, the article makes it seem as if there is only TiVo and MS Media Center. I rent a box from my cable company that records two high def channels at once. However, I wish it had more features listed in the article.
It would be nice to be able to burn TV shows to DVD, for example. My wife keeps recording shows that she is never going to watch and keeps them on the HDD forever (You've Got mail, Down With Love, etc). I'd like some way of backing these up to free up the drive space.
I will not purchase a TiVo because you have to pay for the unit and then pay for the service (right?). That's bogus in my opinion. If I'm going to pay a monthly fee, then I should have the box provided. Also, I'd want the DVD burning ability that TiVo will not provide me.
I won't buy TiVo nor Media Center because I don't know if they are 100% with my digital cable. Will I be able to record two shows at once or record oneand watch another? Not if it has to change the channel on my existing cable box. Will it be able to change the channel on the cable box? Can I throw my cable box out and just use the TiVo unit or Media Center CPU in it's place? I can't find answers to these questions and won't spend the money on either of these units until I know for sure that they will be an improvement over my existing PVR unit.
Finally, the radio idea sounded great. I could record the radio stuff I miss because I do stupid things like work and watch TV.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
If anyone RTFA (I know it's early in the discussion), the man is insane! He wants both companies to pretty much allow copying and sharing of files....I bet Jack Valenti and Hillary Rosen both shit a brick after hearing this guy.
/.) of DRM, he doesn't mention it anywhere in TFA. Sharing/fair use seems to be encouraged...
:)
Examples -
"Create a "My Radio" option and a "My Radio" guide....These files should be saved to MP3 and be portable. "
Heh..."should be saved to mp3 and portable"...Might as well give a big middle finger to the RIAA.
"Provide Ethernet connectivity to their HDTV unit and include the ability to share recorded files with a Windows-based PC. "
While this doesn't run entirely afoul (see previous TiVo sharing articles of yore on
Two more -
"Provide a DVD burner with all units. Copying should be as simple as selecting a program and pressing "Burn to disc" on a menu."
and
"Provide the ability to connect external hard drives."
The RIAA/MPAA/AAA would be up in arms over this....It will never happen - They'd rather eat their own sh!t than allow for fair use and sharing to actually occur...The man has valid (and good) points, but none of them will ever happen in corporate-controlled America.......
But a geek's wet dream if you ask me
My MythTV HowTo
Most people who have media center pc's only have them because it looked cool at Circuit City when they were checkign out the latest HP's.... I mean, they are useful, but having a full desktop PC as my home media center is just ... not viable...Even when connected to a television.
Tivo is only for recording television... correct? Pause, rewind, record live tv... i've never owned a tivo, but that's all I know they do. Sure, wifi on there to share my recordings/play my video and music collection on the main television is great...
The only thing I see here, people want High Def, everything else in the article seems useless..
But what do I know? I just use my xbox to watch my divx/xvid collection and play my mp3's on my home stereo... it's in HD, but it doesn't record... That's what my tuner card in my pc is for. Call me old fasioned, but if I have a 250gig HD, I'd rather use it for my PC + Recordings then a stand alone unit...
Oh yeah, 1st post (so it seems)
The suggestions really start to get redundant, I would have stopped at 5.
Hot off the "Tivo vs poor customer support at Best Buy" article... Kinda funny they use the 1st generation screenshot for media center.
Regardless I have a Tivo in the living room and a Media Center in the bedroom. I just like the media center better so i'll respond with my own biased opinion.
But i'd love someone to actually bundle a remote and IR blaster to plug into their computer to work with one of the free linux PVR's.
Offer support for recording high-definition TV as soon as possible, including an immediate announcement of an anticipated delivery date.
Offer quad (four) tuners - two for regular broadcasts and two for HDTV. There should never be recording conflicts.
Its in the next beta. But microsoft isn't as sharing with details on the beta, or maybe nobody seems to know how to ask.
Provide easy support for 16:9 widescreen video display, including the development of a generic display driver that will display the Media Center software correctly on almost any 16:9 display. Forcing a plasmato display in 4:3 format for extended periods of time creates screen burn.
Maybe you should fire up that windows update, 16:9 support is great in MCE 2004
Develop simple drag-and-drop archiving of shows to DVD. Words like codecs and drivers and DivX and Sonic DVD and memory buffer error should not be a part of the process.
Agreed, Although the third party support in Media Center is beyond anything Tivo has. Tivo hacks be damned nobody has written a plugin that you can use on tivo while watching TV.
Media Center should handle large media libraries better. In the "instant on" world of today, media libraries (especially music) must be indexed and optimized to create instant entertainment. At present Media Center does not handle large digital media libraries well.
Create a "My Radio" option and a "My Radio" guide. If I would like to listen to KFOG's "Live at the Archives" on Wednesday morning at 3 a.m., so be it. If I would like to get a season pass to Howard Stern, great. These files should be saved to MP3 and be portable.
The radio feature is very crippled, but I think this is based on the fact that online radio stations will be the smarter choice for future development.
As for large media, media center handles large lists of recorded tv a WHOLE lot better then my Tivo. Especially when making multiple recordings. And their interface for music is... really good?
Improve stability. Media Center should be as stable and error-free as TiVo's Linux-based system.
Damn true, but the only errors I have is download guide data, I dont know if its Media Center's database or they just keep getting corrupt data from their guide source. But it happens alot. Others dont seem to have this problem. But its running windows so it must be unstable, right?
Provide ratings and preferences in the user profile rather than in the files or players. They must also create some kind of suggestions feature similar to Tivo for television and music. One huge step that Microsoft took in the right direction was creating a music ratings feature. At present these ratings must be the same for all users of a computer. If I like Nirvana and my wife prefers Alan Jackson then we are out of luck.
Microsoft telling you what you want to watch? Nobody is falling for that one. Music is strongly tied for all users. But an interesting feature is the My Videos collection can by global, or per user, music and recorded tv will be there very soon.
Provide ratings and simple filtering capabilities for digital photos. If I want to show pictures of John and Alan and Pete and Bob while they are over for dinner then the filter tool in "my pictures" should allows for me to do this. Put them in a folder, your not going to type in "john and alan" with a remote. This idea wouldn't make it on a
TiVo had shown a reference HDTV unit back at the CES show in January 2003. However, no manufacturers were interested in building it. The DVR market is still small, and HDTV is an even smaller piece of that.
As far as limitations on the HR10-250 unit, you can probably blame DIRECTV. Their Series2-derived DVRs have USB ports that can be used for HMO (Home Media Option) but DTV has chosen not to do so. If you can find 4.0, you can install it on your HDVR2 and enable HMO. So the missing HMO functionality is not a technology issue.
Putting a DVD burner in each unit would be handy, but would also increase the cost. DVRs still aren't in widespread use and keeping the price point high won't help.
Finally, TiVo did announce TiVoToGo, which will allow you to play content on your PC.
Although the article mentions TiVo merging up with a "cash-flow positive company," I think the answer is simpler in that TiVo can just license its highly visible brand to a major cable company and sell branded set-top boxes. TiVo dropped the ball once, but I'm sure it's still up for grabs. TiVo is much more recognizable (e.g. a brand) than General Whatever's generic DCT-XXXX, et al and would help protect against TiVo's waning marketshare in the time-shifted set-top box world.
Props to the writer of the article, also, for mentioning all those wonderful technical possibilites. If only half of those were to come true (and only if I actually watched TV:)!!!
The article is not quite right.
HDTV is possible in Media Center using the VBox DTA-111 card.
Just install the BGA drivers you can record and view HDTV in all its glory on a MCE.
Multi-tuner support is available in the next version of MCE (codename Symphony) which will be released by the end of this month.
Along with a host of features including caller ID
Re: TiVo offering its software for PCs.
...
OK, r-blo is (probably definitely) right that TiVo isn't about to do this, but just think if they did. There are all kinds of caveats that throw this from mere hypothetical to deep pipedream, *but*
- if it was boldy and straightforwardly limited to a certain subset of hardware, "guaranteed to work only with the following video cards and the listed capture devices" etc, and
- if it had just a few amenities *not* offered in the dedicated set-top box (say a TiVo-branded version of Firefox, including Chatzilla and some useful extensions and plug-ins for, say, bittorrent)
- it could deal well with removable storage - adding disks via USB2 or Firewire or SATA or whatever is the smartest fast, external bus
Then I think there'd be an small but real market for it. Most people would probably want the conventional, stereo-component TiVo, but I might pay for TiVo's software if it made easier the process of creating a Linux-based, good-quality, well Q-A'd PVR.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
It was the same done with PCs.
It is why Apple now holds less market share than Linux.
Allow 3rd party integration. Publish the freaking SDK! Let thousands of companies, and millions of hobbiests scratch that itch, and make your product that much better.
In a world where USB and WiFi are ubiquitous, making upgrades and add-ons should be consumer friendly. Now we just have to make it corporate friendly (so they will make the silly products!)
To not, is just a failure of imagination.
I would rather be ashes than dust!
with Apple? Imagine being able to sync your TV shows with a video iPod or your PowerBook!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I've used Windows Media Center, Tivo, and a ReplayTV extensively, and while Tivo has the nicest looking interface, I've settled on the ReplayTV.
First off, (in medium quality), the ReplayTV records in MPEG-2, at a bitrate and resolution that (usually) follow the DVD spec. Sometimes the bitrate goes a little out of spec, but that's not too hard to do. No DRM, and the files can be streamed over the network. Having an ethernet port come standard was a good idea.
Automatic Commercial Skip, and Internet sharing are very nice features, trivial to re-enable. Also, adding a second hard drive took less than 5 minutes, only needing a Y power adapter, an IDE cable, and RTVpatch.
Also, the MyReplayTV site lets me change which shows are recorded while I'm on the road.
I got the RTV a month ago, and I'd seen people raving on about the Replay for quite some time. Now I can see why. While Tivo and Windows Media Center can record shows, neither offers quite the features the ReplayTV does. Activation sucks, but that's what ebay is for.
You can pick up a 40gb for $150 (+ $300 activation), and throw in 2 big hard drives. Not bad for something that actually made watching TV worthwile again. Before, I watched TV when I had a continuous block of time, and hoped something decent was on. Now, I watch TV when I have time, and have a choice of which episode I want to watch, of what show I want to watch.
... cable and satellite companies.
Most of the cable companies provide their own PVR hardware to users, with the twin advantage of being a few dollars cheaper and coming from the people who provide you with the service.
Sure, we here know that their hardware is generally rather simplistic in their features compared to TiVo, but your average person doesn't realize that TiVo is more than just a glorified digital VCR, so the three dollars they save a month seems like a good deal.
Now that DirecTV has plans to switch to one of TiVo's competitors in the form of NDS Group Plc, I fear we're going to see the same happen in the world of satellite as well.
So, in the future, TiVo and Microsoft will be competing against products provided by the people who bring them their cable/dish service, who will have the home-field advantage.
I installed myth on a spare pc and got everything up and running in less than an hour.
I don't know what you're bitching about, the Myth tv installation boots from CD, has a few questions for you and Presto it's been working since. And all I had to give up is 1000Mhz duron and a 200G HD.
Add a RF wireless keyboard and RF A/V sender receiver to connect the TV's and you've got mean ass PVR system.
Add to that fact that tivo doesn't exist in europe and you've got 100% of the market for Mythtv in this neck of the world.
Disclaimer: I did not read the article.
However, wouldn't it be cool if TiVos were cable-card compatible? That's effectively what the DirecTiVos are. Believe it or not, the cable companies would rather charge you $2.00 per month for your cable card than $4.50 per month for a basic (PPV and HBO-like channels) set-top box. Think about how much capital they have invested in set-top boxes. Need a software upgrade? Mail out a new cable card.
--Mike
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."
When I had an Ultimate TV box, I had to say Tivo for people to know what I am talking about. Now I feel dirty and have a Tivo since lightening took out the UTV system. It is a pitty, and as much as I hate to say it, the Microsoft UTV system being 1st generation and over two years old was much better than my brand new Tivo in features and speed.
If I were TiVo I would try to partner with Comcast, perhaps the largest cable TV provider in the USA. That way, Comcast users get the benefits of TiVo (including dual-tuner operation), and Comcast could allocate one of its cable channels to send TiVo programming and software update data in the middle of the night at near-broadband speeds, which means updates only need a few minutes to complete. =)
I was a Tivo user from almost the beginning. Here are a couple of major issues with Tivo - and why I will NOT recommend them. 1st - Customer support is non-existant. Try calling Tivo - To avoid customer contact they have installed the absolutly worst IVR customer support system. Their attitude over the years has gotten progressively worse - they make Intuit look customer centric customer freindly! 2nd - When new hardware comes out they do not allow the transfer of their service. They have done this during very short periods but they never mention the cost of their 'lifetime' programming in their advertisements... It's pure bait and switch. When the unit wears out or is just not pulling it's weight, fork over money for a new box and a new lifetime contract ($250) 3rd - My biggest problem with Tivo is the automatic downloading of 'enhanced content' (PURE ADVERTISING CRAP). I live in CA and my Tivo would try to change channels on me at 1:17am (4:17 am on the east coast so NY people don't have this problem.) I like to channel surf so hitting the record this show button would lock me into a specific show. I know this does not sound like a big deal, but for years Tivo would make a phone call to download the schedules.... Tivo changed it so that they would piggyback the schedules along with programs that you are forced to download (by it changing the channel without permission).... It trys 3 times after 1am and I am a late night person... Made the system useless for me after all those years. Bottom line - best software as a PVR, but the good company of yesteryear is absolutly a nightmare to deal with and are lying to their original fans who made them what they are (by recommendations). I now have a Dish 921 - Dual channel HDTV PVR and it is both awesome and very, very flawwed - but at least they arent changing the rules and ignoreing their customers....