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

[FredThompson]

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.

Re:We have a Tivo and a Cox DVR

[Lumpy]

unfortunately you are in the minority.

Rumor has it that a couple of larger cable companies are looking at starting a "trade-in" program on tivo's.

trade in your tivo and get 2 dual tuner HD dvr boxes for free as well as 3 months of free HD/extended premium tier service.

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.

Re:We have a Tivo and a Cox DVR

[gweedoz]

It is hard to appreciate the ease of use of a Tivo until you use it. I have had a Tivo for over a year and recently got a timewarner HD PVR (Explorer 8300HD). Tivo has a simple remote and VERY intuitive software. My 7 year old mastered it without any trouble. This "new" cable DVR, while it seems to be good hardware (HDMI, dual tuners, etc.) has the worst software I've seen. The remote has a button for every function, the majority of which don't do anything unless you are in a specific part of the menu system. There has been little thought of design and ease of use, rather it has simply put in the basics of recording. It is not that much better than a VCR.

The Tivo sets the standard for finding programs to record, recording them, prioritizing your recordings, setting up season passes, parental controls, channel listings, program information, innovative features (fast forward adjust) and on.

One could argue that the cable companies will catch up, but I don't think so. The cable boxes I've used recently behave no differently than they did when I had them over 5 years ago. They are still horrid ugly poorly thought out things.

I hope Tivo can get their cable card HD box out before the unwashed masses get sucked into the mediocrity of cable pvrs.

Tivo's popular because of non-technical people.

[bigtallmofo]

Every technical person knows how great Tivo is, and further how open and extensible it is, etc. But that isn't what makes Tivo popular or successful. It's the average non-technical person that discovered Tivo and was willing to pay a fee per month to digitally record their shows. Now that cable and satellite is giving such a service away with no extra monthly fee, I'm afraid there's nothing Tivo can do to keep their customer base long-term.

The SDK and the gizmos that will come out of it will attract a small set of the user base... But that won't sustain the company unfortunately.

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

[millahtime]

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 highly doubt it. Popularity comes from making it easy to use and marketing/brand naming. Microsoft, AOL and others have shown that to the average joe six pack it's not about innovation.

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

[crawling_chaos]

Popularity comes from making it easy to use and marketing/brand naming. Microsoft, AOL and others have shown that to the average joe six pack it's not about innovation.

I'm about to do something I never thought I would -- defend AOL. At the time the original AOL was released, it was innovative. Nobody else was packaging a bulletin board system that was as friendly or as feature laden. People started to get on to AOL who found Compuserve or the local BBS scene far too intimidating.

The Internet sort of drove a stake in to that model, and it can be argued that AOL hasn't done any innovation lately (except in the creative marketing and creative accounting fields), but the original product took off because it was something different from what was already out there. Isn't that innovation by definition?

TiVo seems to be in a similar boat. They've brought a technology to the masses that only the truly geeky could have had before. The real question is can TiVo find a way to add a feature that makes owning a TiVo and paying the service contract worthwhile? And before you say that there is nothing out there, remember that many analysts didn't think TiVo would make it this far, as everyone already owned a VCR to tape Friends.

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

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!).

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.

Re:I guess someone at TiVo downloaded Mythtv

[FredThompson]

Why stop there?

Direct satellite signal recording
Myth NOPE!!!
TiVo Yes

DirecTV with TiVo receivers store the actual satellite signal, not a captured version of an analog signal. Most of what you credit to Myth is really a PC with a video out card. May as well claim Myth supports RAR, WMP, QT, Flash, etc. ad nauseum.

Re:Wow! Really?

[Naikrovek]

yeah you can have your mythtv do all of that. for no monthly fee yes.

but the initial cost of your mythtv box is at least 10x what the initial cost of a tivo is. that's a large barrier of entry.

computer with dvd burner, large hard disk, tuner cards, video card with tv-out, costs a lot more than a tivo.

very tired of this 'mythtv is better than everything else in the whole wide world, and if you don't use it you are an idiot' business that is going on here.

Tvs

[cparisi]

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

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

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.