TiVo to Offer SDK

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. "

Comments

We have a Tivo and a Cox DVR

[richardoz]

I have to say that the Tivo wins the usability contest hands down. Even though the Cox box has the ability to record two channels at once, I prefer my Tivo.

The GUI is intuitive to operate - it took my wife no time to figure it out. As for the Cox box, well we haven't even figured out how to delete a show we are watching without fast forwarding to the end - to get the "special menu".

Re:We have a Tivo and a Cox DVR

[tgibbs]

this will pretty much destroy the TiVo when it happens. I love my Replay box, but the dual tuner motorola DVR box records digital channels far better and easier than Tivo or Replay can ever hope to... The advantage of having the decoding and descrambling hardware in the box is huge. While the "cable card" ready tivo is years away.

The outboard cable TiVo is doomed. As superior as the software is, it cannot compete with dual tuner HD cable boxes that are now available in most markets for a few bucks extra on your cable bill.

Of course, DirecTV users are enjoying the best of both--dual tuner TiVos--even HD if you are willing to pay the stiff price for a HD TiVo DVR. Between DirecTV and the TiVo equipped DVD recorders, TiVo will probably be OK for a while. But even DirecTV is looking to move away from TiVo to their own DVR (even though they just released a new Tivo equipped model).

So the future of TiVo is probably the CableCard equipped systems. To compete feature-for-feature with cable boxes (so that users can send back their rented cable boxes and save on rental fees, making TiVo's own monthly fees more palatable), TiVo requires the CableCard 2.0 standard, which won't be ready until next year (assuming the cable companies don't manage to beg a delay).

However, once the CableCard standard comes in, Tivo has a good shot at moving in on the high end of the cable box market. Since cable box DVRs are rented, users have no financial commitment, and can potentially be wooed away by TiVo. The delay may even work to TiVo's benefit, because in a year or two TiVo should be able to offer a system considerably more attractive than the cable company DVRs, and cable companies are going to have a hard time keeping up, because everytime they roll out a hardware upgrade, existing customers are going to want to swap their boxes.

The real wild card is Apple--the one company with a reasonable shot of surpassing TiVo for software design. Jobs was talking a lot about HD in his last address. I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple spring a DVR equipped Mac as soon as the CableCard 2.0 standard is final.

Re:We have a Tivo and a Cox DVR

[Suidae]

It can't handle "season passes" properly.

Not having a Tivo, I don't really know what makes a 'season pass' special. If it could do something like transparently pull down episodes that I missed six weeks ago, it might be worth it.

The Cox DVR will record by series with several options (first run, reruns, on any channel, etc) Unfortunately its too stupid to know that the SciFi channel airs the good stuff twice, so I always get two of everthing.

Searching for shows takes forever; there is no searching by title and then displaying all upcoming episodes;

You must have had the old software. You can search by title and it will display all upcoming episodes. The search is a little popup keyboard that you use to type the name of the show. It does a partial text match so you rarely have to type more than a few characters. As you type it will grey letters on the keyboard if there are no further matches for the search term that would be created by appending that letter to the current search term. It works quite well.

no "wishlist" capability.

That would be nice. So would predictive capture (IE, compare what I've selected to record with what other people have selected and make suggestions based on similarities). Lots of options there, that would probably be third on my feature wishlist (after centralized recording (the equivalent of a 1000 channel decoder and unlimited HD space) and the ability to deliver shows to other TV's in my house (preferably on a standard cable channel so I don't need multiple boxes)).

If it is already in the middle of recording a show, you can't tell it to start playing the show from the beginning.

Hmm, can't remember doing that, but it does have a 'Play from beginning' option from the List menu. I'd be surprised if that wasn't available if it was already recording.

It doesn't warn you if you have exceeded your capbility -- it just stops recording shows.

Only if you have told it to never erase anything. Otherwise it starts recording over old stuff, also with no warning.

It needs better handling for marathons too. If someone plays 50 episodes of Flying Circus I'd like to only get about 4 of them before it starts ignoring them.

It is, in short, a piece of crap.

I'd call that overly harsh, its not crap, it just has lots of potential :)

The big attraction is that for about 15 bucks a month and no committment (ie, if I decide I don't want it I can take it back, no questions asked) I get a full HDTV digital cable recorder that works pretty well.

What I'm really waiting for is for the cable company to start recording every show they broadcast so that I can view them at any time without having previously selected to record them. They do this now with Stars, Showtime and (iirc) HBO. Its fantastic.

Next I want them to archive all aired episodes of every show, trim the commercials and let me pay a buck or two to watch each one (including recording and burning to CD if I so desire).

Finally, I want them to give me an application that runs on my computer that, when I'm on their cable modem network (or otherwise validated as a subscriber to their service), will allow me to do all of this directly from my computer.

I'd also be fine with whomever owns the rights to episodes doing something similar. I'd be happy to pay Paramount or whomever a few bucks to download any commercial-free episode of their shows from their servers, to play on my computer or to write to VCD/DVD to play on my TV.

Re:I guess someone at TiVo downloaded Mythtv

[Mr Guy]

And while we're at it (To give them some more ideas)

Myth Check
DVD Playback - Yes
DVD Ripping - Yes
Picture Gallery - Yes
Music Jukebox - Yes
Easy web configuration - Yes

Question

[JamesD_UK]

Does anyone know if obtaining the SDK requires the agreement to an NDA or similar license agrement as some other SDKs do? It would be nice if the SDK does not preclude the writing of Free Software.

I mention this as I've had difficulties in the past developing software for platforms only documented inside a NDA 'protected' SDK.

For who ?

[mirko]

TiVo was invented for people to busy to be able to attend complete tv shows.
Now,if they cannot afford to watch these, how come they have enough time to program it ?

Re:Tivo's popular because of non-technical people.

[medication]

Actually, after RTFA, I disagree. I think the purpose of releasing a SDK is to foster new innovations. From the article:

The company is out to show that the TiVo service "is much more than about DVR," said Howard Look, vice president of application and user experience at TiVo. "All the great ideas don't have to come just from us."

The strategy isn't to address a small community of developers and techs, but rather to generate functionality that can be developed by the Tivo people and pushed to the larger/non-technical population.

I'm in...

[bblazer]

I have both a Tivo and a DVR supplied by Time Werner. Tivo wins hands down. I would be one of the first in line to get the SDK and start writing some apps for it. It would be cool to see a web site with a ton of free (as in beer) and pay apps to download to extend the functionality of the Tivo. If they opened it up, you might even see better bug releases. While this type of thing may not lead to a company's survival by itself, it may open the door to a new way to market the product (as in "Hey everybody, buy Tivo and you can download a lot of cool stuff to make it work how YOU want it to work!).

Mp3 Album Art, Visualizations...

[Anonymous Coward]

Series 2 tivos already support the playing of mp3s via the home media options...but...

What would be really great was if this development kit would allow for a Jukebox type interface...one that allowed the user to browse by Album art to select a song. Also, a plugin architecture that would allow some snazzy visualizations would be killer too...

-h3dge

Seems obvious...

[Anonymous Coward]

To simply restore TiVo to it's original functionality - watch TV with no stinkin' advertisements in your face. Bet the SDK won't let you do that.

Tivo is just screwed. There is no barrier to entry for this kind of device.

Re:JavaHMO

[mkraft]

Yep, JavaHMO can do basically everything that TiVo is adding already. Here's a list of what it can do from it's web site:

View images in the following formats: BMP, GIF, FlashPix, JPEG, PNG, PNM, TIFF, and WBMP.

Rotate images.

Play MP3 files.

Random/shuffle play.

View MP3 file tag information.

Play MP3 streaming stations on the internet.

Sort items by different criteria.

Organize MP3 files based on their ID3 tags.

Automatically download Shoutcast playlists of your favorite streaming stations.

Use the streaming proxy server to significantly improve on the inadequate support TiVo provides for online streaming stations.

Play your MP3 files and streaming stations using both .m3u and .pls playlist formats.

View live local weather conditions including current conditions, 5-day forecasts and radar images.

View local cinema listings.

Automatically download and view any image on the internet.

View a real-time image of your PC desktop.

Play interactive games such as TicTacToe.

Manual connections from TiVo.

Platform independent.

Supports TiVo Beacon API.

Provides a plugin architecture.

Organize images files based on their date information.

View fullscreen images of web pages.

Audio Jukebox.

View stock quotes.

iTunes playlists integration.

Read email.

View NNTP images from newsgroups.

View RSS feeds.

View NOAA weather alerts.

ToGo.

All that and it's open source.

Comcast = not free DVR

[FubarPA]

A little off-topic, but when I checked into it, Comcast wanted to charge me 10 dollars on top of everything else for DVR functionality.

My Cox PVR wins hands down

[jocknerd]

Just got it 3 weeks ago and for the money, TiVo has no chance in the long run. $10 a month for Cox's PVR. I was paying $13 a month just for TiVo's download of the programming. Plus recording 2 shows at once is huge. If TiVo had never made the Series 2 next to impossible to get the recorded stuff off of it, I would have stayed with it. But they gave in to Hollywood and the TV industry so screw them.

Re:My Cox PVR wins hands down

[lmsig]

So you can pull your shows off the Cox DVR then? I didn't think so.

How is Cox not even MORE hollywood, big business, evil empire?

Tvs

[cparisi]

TiVo should get bundled with TV's. You can get any closer to the target market than that.

Re:Tvs

[duncan7]

One retailler is already bundling them, presumably with TiVo's blessing.

TiVo Cable/Satellite DVR

[Chappy01]

I have Comcast and have tried their version of the DVR, and there is absolutely no comparison between that and TiVo. There's no doubt that the cable/satellite companies have 'mastered' recording of shows, but half of TiVo is the UI, and it's simplicity. The Comcast DVR that I had was horrendous. It was slow, difficult to use, froze, crashed, etc, etc, etc. I had it for a week and sent it back. I then bought another refurbished TiVo, threw 2, 80 GB hard drives in there and I'm back in business and I'm never going back.

I would love to see the ability to transfer shows from one TiVo to another across my network (similar to the ReplayTV units of yesteryear). It would be awesome to pull a show from another TiVo to watch elsewhere in the house. If the boys in legal can figure out a way to appease the suits, it would be the next revolution in television viewing. I also think the ability to record one show and watch another is crucial. The satellite TiVo units have that functionality, but I want it extended to all TiVo's. If they start adding functionality like that, it might give them the boost they need.

Game emulation.

[LWATCDR]

Why not make a deal with who ever owns Atari and Sega to put game emulators on the Tivo. Retro gaming is all the rage these days. Throw in MAME just for fun and you are good to go.

Re:I guess someone at TiVo downloaded Mythtv

[dr_canak]

"Picture Gallery - Yes
Music Jukebox - Yes
Easy web configuration - Yes"

These are already available in the Series 2 Tivo's. I finally got around to getting a proper USB network adapter (a couple are officially supported, several are reported to work, but unfortunately most are still a no-go).

Anyway, it took 5 minutes to get my TIVO networked and start sharing photos and music files from one of my desktop p.c.s. Really nice actually, and with the TIVO wired through the home stereo, works quite nicely. There are other features I wish it had (like the ability to save and load pre-set song lists), but maybe that will come with time.

I did quite a bit of research into building my own PVR/Myth box, but it seemed that cost and time to set up just was too prohibitive, despite all the additional features that come with building you own. With Myth, my impression is that even the most tech savy have to put forth some effort to get the thing completly streamlined and working flawlessly. To TIVO's credit, it really is a very simple plug and play device. And aside from adding an additional harddrive, the cost of TIVO with the monthly fee is still quite a bit less than building a dedicated PVR/Myth box. And as another user pointed out, my wife who is not the most tech savy had Tivo figured out in no time. With the added benefit of remote programming from work, she's thrilled.

And on a somewhat related note, as a shareholder in Redhat, this is the kind of stuff where Linux is the future and gets me excited; writing custom apps for proprietary hardware. It just seems like there is so much potential there. I'm glad to see TIVO offer up an SDK to keep the features coming.

jeff

I love 'em, but they've missed the boat.

[Overzeetop]

The cool things that you can do directly with TiVo, and all the really cool things you can do with hacks (and roll-your-own PVRs for that matter) are the things that the studios don't want you to do. TiVo has the bonus of being able to be operated by just about anyone. This MATTERS! I want something my wife is comfortable with, and is pretty darned stable. Moreover, if something goes wrong and her show gets missed, it damned well better no be my fault. This rules out anything but a consumer box in my house. The ability to let the tech savvy strip/rip/burn to their hearts content means the whole family can play.

I'm frustrated that TiVo lets their name be used on DirecTV sets, as the gap between the real TiVo and the locked-down, abandoned, ugly step-child of receiver they call DirecTiVo grows almost daily. I have one, and it does everything my old standalone did...four years ago. Yes, it's cheaper (no dialups to wory about). Yes it records two streams (a feature lacking in the SA). But if you look at the comparison of features on their own website, it pales in comparison to the new features of the SA models. And even the SAs are missing some key features (real transfers, real commercial skip, cut points for recording, etc.).

They're caught between a rock and a hard place - consumers who will leave them if they protect the content, and studios who will sue them into oblivion if they don't. I think they've chosen the wrong path for long term success. *shrug* (BTW, the embeded DVD recorder versions do look promising, but -once again - they're not available for DTV)

Its a losing battle.

[tgd]

I had Tivo since a few months after it came out. Four total boxes, also gave another four or five as gifts over the years.

I called last week and cancelled my service. (Boy they make that hard to do...)

Why? They're two years behind the ball where technology is concerned. Their vastly superior interface is totally wasted because it can't actually record half the stuff I watch. Its a hack at best to get it to work with a digital cable box, and no HD support at all. They told me all about the new HD box they would have out in 18 months when I cancelled, and I just had to wonder why it wasn't out now? My TV has CableCard. Clearly Sony was able to see it was a needed step to take.

I've seen arguments made my people on /. that Tivo couldn't have been faster to the market because CableCard just became available, forgetting thats to consumers. Clearly the companies have been working on units for ages.

I may hop back into the Tivo fold if their new box lives up to reasonable expectations, but its hard to argue with a $10/month box with dual HD/digital/analog tuners, 160 gig of space and a tolerable UI now that Comcast has rolled out the new TV Guide software.

I think the SDK is a poor attempt to keep the attention of their core market -- early adopters, because early adopters have all adopted other video hardware that makes the Tivo obsolete.

I'm not sure the ability to see an RSS feed or weather on the Tivo will keep someone who just dropped $3k on a HD set interested in Tivo, when they can get a box from their cable company for less money that works with it.

The cable company DVR/PVR may be better value

[klausboop]

I don't know about Cox and other cable companies, but I have Time Warner's DVR in upstate New York. I know a few people who moved out of the area after having the Time Warner box, and, naturally being hooked on PVR, immediately bought a Tivo. They were disappointed.

They cited two things: First, Time Warner's Scientific American box can record one show while you're watching another on TV. Better yet, it can record TWO shows while you're watching one you've already recorded! And you get full transport controls of the show you're watching. The new Tivo owners couldn't believe that they were back in the days of A/B switchboxes and stuff if they wanted to watch one show and revcord another.

While the Tivo's user interface was unquestionably easier to use and the SA box's "Season Pass"-type functionality is flawed, the SA did everything they wanted decently enough to transform their television experience and hook them, plus it was an incredibly simple, one-connection-to-the-tv hookup to do everything they wanted. (Disclaimer: my understanding is that some of the Tivos that come with satellite have multiple tuners, alleviating that problem)

Second, from what they reported and I've seen myself, the SA box has a better picture. My guess is that the Tivo is having to re-encode the stream where the SA box, built on top of digital cable, is just saving the same stream you'd be watching through the regular digital cable box.

Even though the Tivo's season pass is better, and its guide is better, and it can do predictive recording and home networking, I think that customers, faced with an additional $5 for the Time Warner DVR (it only costs an additional $5 over plain Digital Cable) or hundreds of dollars for the Tivo on top of monthly fees (or more hundreds for lifetime)...well, the Tivo is just not so much better than my cable companie's offering to be worth that much money. That was the economic decision I made myself, though I certainly covet the wish list and home networking features.

PS - Another Tivo killer: with Time Warner, if you want multiple cable boxes in your house, it costs the same price to get another DVR as it does to get a plain digital cable box. While home networking would sure be cool, we added a whole second DVR to the bedroom for the same price as a Tivo monthly fee.

Why this is big...

[graiz]

This is big news because it allows third party developers to create applications that play on the TV. This means that existing applications writers can extend the Tivo platform.
- Play your powerpoint slides on a TV
- Control your home automation on your TV
- Check your baby-monitor on your TV
- Get stock quotes on your TV

Any application that currently runs on a PC can explore opportunities to provide a TV based user experience. It's not about the three demo apps that are included. (Weather, news, RSS) it's about the 2 million homes that are now enabled with a platform that extends into the living room. In the next two months you'll see some amazing applications as all the Tivo enthusiasts go and create innovative applications.

(I believe this is the fruit of the strangeberry project)