Slashdot Mirror
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.
Boxing Equipment Reviews
come on now, don't we know better than to gauge the intellectual capacity of someone by how many patents they hold?
Yeah, they were doing poorly, but have enough subscribers that they have a decent revenue stream. In fact, on the second page they even explain this. So this guy isn't 'saving TiVo', he's simply trying to make it enormous.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Isn't the fact that Tivo can't (or didn't) get patent protection for its business just as strong an indictment of the patent system as all the lame patents we complain about?
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.
MP3s to your multi-zone a/v system
DVD rips to the closest TV
Spam to skillet in kitchen (yumm!)
And holographic programs to the nearest holodeck..
Recipes for geeks -- no meatloaf, we promise.
If they'd publish a SDK and you'll have *millions* of programmers saving Tivo, instead of just one.
And an easy way of deleting channels - with a thumbnail that shows what's on it?
And the prevention of third parties removing all sorts of useful features like home media option, networking, ect. (DirectTV, you dirty SOBs).
Admittedly, these are the big 3 things that annoy me about my Tivo - I don't know if they are common to standalones, but IMHO DirectTV has really wrecked something good
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.
Except they are all terrible. I have a Scientific Atlanta PVR and it hurts me to have to use it.
Tivo already has a great device, they just need to convince cable companies to bundle them instead of crappy knock-offs.
The death of TiVo is greatly exaggerated. Time Warner offers the DVR in my area. I got it after using TiVo for 3 years. I sent it back within a week. The thing sucks.
TiVo's wealth of advantages are it's software. Season Passes, rating show thumbs up/thumbs down getting other shows based on your ratings, etc. I've used them since 2000. With the recent price reductions in the monthly charge it's well worth it. I've got one on both TVs and use my wireless network to connect for the updates/transfer files between them.
When I wanted to upgrade, I get a new one for $199 - $299 or whatever and keep paying the $12.95 for the first / $6.95 there after makes more sense than the $299 up front because I've yet to keep a TiVo for two years due to upgrades, change in whatever, etc.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Change the channel guide like this:
* Go to your guide,
* Hit the "info" button on your remote,
* Change the style from DirecTV grid to Tivo Live Guide.
The Tivo style guide is better (IMO) and super fast. I'm guessing that they had to include the DirecTV grid for some contractual reason, but really want to folks to use their EPG.
Jonathan
Business school case study #1: shitty clone products use existing market penetration and/or low price point to destroy premium product offering from market first mover.
Arthur Van Hoff's resume replete with list of patents here.
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."
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.
TiVo's tenacious market position and profit margins has been a frontpage business story for months now. Great product, yes, but they are in an awkward crossroads businesswise.
I am very concerned that moving forward TiVO and HD will be largely incompatible.
The movement of video enthusiasts to HDTV is a massive looming problem, as Tivo has little possibility of distribution of HDTV without a carrier deal, and their only existing one (DirectTV) is a tenuous one at best.
It has already been regulated that HD signals will be flagged for copyright and all hardware manufacturers will be required by the FCC to honor it by not recording HD flagged with it, which could cast a long shadow over OTA HD recording.
Cable companies are moving forward with making money off their own (likely lameass) HD cable box PVR solutions, and seemingly have no intention of opening their HD boxes to TiVo access.
Strangeberry is a solution i search of a problem.
The problem is HDTV. IMHO, PVR is more important than HDTV, but I sure am tired of watching TiVo programming on my 16:9 42" HDTV - its not pretty, even in Extreme Fine Quality mode.
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*?
tivo story, but its still as true now as a week ago.
MythTV is a nightmare to set up, and there's no company out there that I can buy a pre-configured one from. KnoppMyth may work if you have a certain set of hardware, but my time is far too valuable to spend a week researching the right hardware, buying $500 or $1000 worth of computing equipment and a case suitable for going in my living room, and blowing a day setting it all up.
If I could buy a decent looking unit that I plugged in and works, then I'd buy one. Until then, I've outgrown the need to blow days at a time playing with that sort of stuff. I enjoy it sometimes, but I'm just plain too busy.
At $100 for a Tivo, thats maybe an hour or two worth of my time. Hard to compete with that.
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.
Intelligent Life on Earth