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The Programmer Who Could Save Tivo
Damon Darlin from Business 2.0 writes "We just posted a story on Arthur Van Hoff, the programming legend who now works at TiVo. He was one of the Java geniuses at Sun (has almost as many patents as Bill Joy) and started Strangeberry, which Tivo bought in January.
the story tells how his Strangeberry software will be given away to developers of web content. The next generation Tivos will then be able to recognize web content and direct it to the appropriate home device. This could be the stuff that saves tivo because none of the set top boxes will have this ability.
He needs to get into the DirecTV DVR code and figure out why it takes 30 seconds to display the guide, a minute to open your "Now Playing" list of shows, and 5+ minutes to sort a 30-entry list of season passes.
A huge fraction of Tivo's subscriber base is through the DirecTV tivos-- and despite my great experience with the standalone unit I had, the DirecTV box is so much slower despite 4x the processor speed that I can't even imagine what sort of horrible code is in there. Optimize the UI, *then* add features. DirecTV may singlehandedly turn millions of people away from tivo after they sign up and have a truly subpar experience with it.
Isn't this the same sort of hyperconsumerist thinking that drove :DigitalConvergence into the ditch too? The makers of the :CueCat also had a cable, which connected one's TV audio output to one's soundcard input, and software to recognize "cues" in the audio, which would then pull up the appropriate page on the computer.
People won't flock to a technology because it infests their computer with all the same advertising they see on TV. People will run screaming the other way, but grab the nifty hardware on the way out.
Damon Darlin from Business 2.0 writes "We just posted a story on...
Wow - I guess advertisements no longer need to be camouflaged at all.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
of their own success. Basically, TiVo replaces a standard VCR, only more effectively. It can record shows while playing back, it can let you skip commercials more effectively than a VCR and it's a cool device.
But a "generic TiVo" leased from cable and satellite television companies does the same thing exactly. They all enhance the television viewing experience with high-quality instant playback for "timeshifting." What none of these devices do is allow you to permanently record television in a removable device.
Want to (temporarily) save TiVo? Add a feature that will take a certain segment of the recorded video to an on-board dual-layer DVD recorder. Let the viewer have the option of cutting out the commercials, starting the recording at a certain spot and ending at a certain spot, pick up recording when the actual program restarts, etc. Once you are all done, you have a DVD for your collection.
The reason why this is a temporary save is that the generic models will immediately try to do the same thing. Hey, competition sux sometimes.
I don't use my computer while I'm watching television. I do know that there are some people whose only access to the Internet, e-mail and the Worldwide Web are through devices like "WebTV" but I can't see that (small) market really hustling out there to get a TiVo. Bill Gates is correct; the television viewing experience is really different from that of working on a computer. The only possible likeness is playing games.
Were TiVo able to enhance a game-player's experience, they'd really have something. Perhaps one possible enhancement would be the creation of a shared on-line experience for console games that do not allow networked game play, but that sounds unlikely to me.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
Since many are hooked to the internet 24/7, I'd love to see IMDB integration with Tivo -- have the details screen for a program show you an IMDB page (or IMDB data) for the given movie, with the ability to browse around and then pick selections for future wishlists, etc.
For On Demand to work, they have to eliminate the pay-per-view model. Comcast is unlikely to ever let that go, which is a shame.
Forget first run movies, forget the hundreds of specialty channels. Give me the regular gammut of channels, put all the specialty stuff on On Demand. No need for 5 "home improvement" channels, if I wanted to watch some episodes of "this old House" where they tackled a project like my own, I could.
But I never paid to watch it on PBS, and if I was going to pay to watch it, I'd order the DVD collection. I (like many others) don't like spending money on stuff I don't get to keep. There's probably some human nature psychology crap to explain that.
Thing is, their business model isnt based on giving customers what they want. It's based on bundling a dozen useless channels with one good one, and making you pay for all of them.
Digital cable - to them - is nothing about picture quality or cool new features, it's all about requiring me to pay for each TV in my home.
On Demand isn't about cool technology, it's about making me pay every time I watch a show.
Meh. TV is dying, the cable industry is killing it. I was reading an article about how book sales are climbing, and it was alluding to the fact that corporations are killing other forms of popular entertainment (TV, movies, radio, video games), and more people are turning back to books. Which, ultimately is a good thing, I suppose.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Stipe42, you may be right, but I have to wonder sometimes if comments like yours are, for lack of a better word, defensive blogging by marketing people.
You know, someone paid to sit around all day and defend a company's product online in high-profile blogs and review sites like Slashdot, using legitimate user profiles (or in this case, maybe as a marketroid for cable companies looking to slam DirectTV).
Does anyone know if "defensive blogging" happens? I googled for pages on this topic but couldn't find any stories about it, but I'm sure it happens.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Does a patent force you to disclose your idea? Of course: it's required. But that's not its purpose. Far more people have been sharing ideas for decades through journals (ACM, IEEE, etc.) and not using patents.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
The "TiVo picking things for you" is nice, but the main effect of getting TiVo is that you're no longer tied to times. My wife and I routinely record things during the week, then "catch up" saturday afternoon. If we don't really care about something, it just sorta expires.
Also, if you're a sports fan, TiVo is worth its weight in gold. No commercials, no halftime, you can blitz through "plays under review", and, at least for football, you can even blow through the huddle. I've watched every play of an entire game in about an hour. Basically, TiVo gave me most of my Sunday back.
Oh, and we have two Series 1 TiVos from about 5 years ago, and they still work fine. They're a little small compared to the new ones, but we don't usually fill ours up anyway.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
IBM doesn't own most of the software written for the IBM-PC, yet they still make money from that product line from the early 1980s.
You'd think Tivo would be content to be the IBM of the consumer space.
The DVR that your cable company gives you might not be all it's cracked up to be... witness this rant from boing boing...
I hate this digital video recorder: Scientific-Atlanta Explorer 8000
As much as I like making my own homebrew alternatives to TiVo, and think competition is a good thing... UI-wise TiVo still has the lead (hopefully they won't blow it)
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
It is very useful, more so than cable I would say. OTA transmissions give you few choices and less time slots. I'd get a Tivo long before getting cable. When I first moved into my house I just had rabbit ears hooked to my tivo for the first 3 months. I would rather have Broadcast TV/Tivo than Cable TV w/o Tivo. Although Tivo + Cable is a good combination as well. I don't even bother renting movies, hurrying home for a show, or missing out on Friday night Sci-Fi to go out with friends, just pick the from the list during the week and watch them on the weekend when I have 2-3 hours to spend.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
There's a ton of missing features right now on Tivo -- batch save to VCR, and so on.
Instead of adding a bunch of "intraweb" integration, why not make it much more featureful at what it primarily is *for*?
There are those of us to whom Tivo is unavailable. For example, I live in Canada and am unable to get a Tivo. I would if I could, but they don't sell up here.
Enter MythTV. Although I haven't built one yet, it's only because I was busy getting married this summer. However, MythTV appears to have a very high spouse approval factor, in that next year I do plan on building one. And the wife is not only ok with it, she's encouraging me to just go for it.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Open source software is great however; I don't think my Dad will be installing MythTV or Freevo anytime soon. The nice thing about TiVo is that it just works. Anybody who is reasonably competent can setup TiVo and have it running in a matter of minutes.
On another note, TiVo needs to be aware of what the open source community is doing. They need to look into supporting or integrating open source work into their product.
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Alex
TiVoBlog.com
RaianoFamily.com
Last go 'round, I swear.
/. geezers like it or not.
1. Okay, so I got lucky.
2. No, I bought it pre-built. Did you include in your time estimate how long it took Philips or Sony to assemble your box? No. Of course not. I added an ethernet card to my TiVO and a TV card to my Myth experiment. Its a wash.
3. Okay, so you have 1/10th the features that Myth offers.
4. MythTV is not a viable alternative for 99.99% -- I'm *really* not trying to argue, but I sure hate it when people use that figure. As if you're in a position to say.
5. its not a real option for replacing Tivo until I can order a MythTV box for the same price -- Not a real option for you. Granted.
6. If I was in college and had lots of free time to screw with things, I'd be all over it, too. -- Don't know where that one came from. I'm usually the one throwing the "call me when you graduate, kiddo" line. Maybe you thought I had an extra digit on my UID or something (and forgot that UIDs around 500k graduated 3 years ago). I mean, I respect your seniority, but you only predate me by about a year. Sorry, we're both
Thanks for the dialog. I only hope you see things are better than you remember. I experimented with it. It worked out of the box. I bought the PC to be an ESX Server so I had to blow it away and move on. I guess I am a "one in ten thousand" kinda guy.
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