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TiVo to Offer SDK

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the get-your-hack-on dept.

Thomas Hawk writes "TiVo has begun an effort to court third party developers to try and figure out a way to provide additional add on type services to somehow differentiate itself from the satellite and cable providers that are presently nipping at their heels. Initially the company plans to release three add ons: a weather information plug in, an RSS reader and a game. David Pogue of the New York Times is out with some of the features [NYT=Check soul at door] that at present already make TiVo a superior offering to the cable and satellite freebies. "

1 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Re:We have a Tivo and a Cox DVR by FredThompson · · Score: 3, Informative

    Nothing prevents you from having more than one TiVo. DTiVos have 2 tuners and balance the ToDo list between them.

    Yes, the UI is superior to all the competitors. Hack the box to get TivoWebPlus and JavaHMO on it and you're cooking.

    RSS has been available for quite a while. Weather, sports stats, caller ID, stodck info and headlines have been available for a few years.

    Some form of ToDo list killer based on matches from a list would be great. IOW, run the internal priority process then remove from the ToDo list those entries which match the list.

    Parsing the song data from the music channels and pulling the album cover from allmusic or Amazon and putting that on the screen along with persistent album and song title would be nice instead of the stupid blackout.

    Shoutcast support including serving across a LAN would be cool. Yeah, like the music mafia wouldn't have a cow over that one...

    Theoretically, a web browser could be made but support would have to be for very limited formatting and no motion. Still, wouldn't it be cool to do overlays from IMDB while a movie is on?

    JavaHMO has a tic-tac-toe implementation but the hardware isn't capable of sophisticated graphics. You could do nethack but that's about it.

    IR keyboard support would be great, especially when searching by titles. That would also allow text-only adventure games. Heh, 20 years later and we go back to 40-column text adventure games.

    PiP isn't really supported but maybe some kind of text IM with buddies as text overlay on the lower third of the screen would be possible. Would require keyboard support, though.

    Well, OK, if we've come that far, blog overlay.