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Apple to Buy TiVo?
vallette writes "Reuters is reporting that Apple may be interested in buying TiVo. Seems like a good fit to me. Both companies stock price is up on the rumor."
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dude, thos pictures have already been confirmed fakes. You can see that it's just a white cardboard box with a color-laserprint top and front and ports...
heh.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
Really, why would Apple want Tivo? Last I heard tivo was starting to fall on hard times.
Far better off just making their own PVR software. You can already hack together a pretty nice PVR using a Motorola DCT-6200 and a Mac. see here : http://macteens.com/more.php?id=410_0_1_0_C
The only reason Apple might want tivo is to leverage themselves somehow into the way that cable/satellite/ip content is distributed, just to block M$ push. Maybe i'm missing something but I don't see how buying tivo would help much if any with this.
That said I would love to see a nice Mac Mini DVR from Apple. That said if they don't make one, not too hard to make one yourself.
I, for one, welcome our iPippen overlords
Misconception Alert!
Don't worry, it's a minor one.
Pixlet is designed for video editing. It compresses each frame individually. This is good for doing certain effects, since any frame can be pulled out of context.
MPEG-4 compression uses previous frames to make a frame. This allows the file to be smaller, but doesn't allow frames to pulled out of context for effects to be added.
Hope that clears things up! Otherwise, great post.
Help I'm a rock.
TiVo Sale Rumors -- link
by: phillipswann 02/23/05 12:21 pm
Msg: 239226 of 239994
http://www.swannisez.com/tivorumor022305.html
(If you look at that link now, it's a rehash of Reuters news concerning the rumor, with no hint that Swann -- who has probably scared himself half to death by singlehandedly moving the market -- started this rumor himself)
At 3:11 pm, Marketwatch issued a sloppy story that credited an entity called "Inside Digital Media" for cracking the apple buyout story. However, if you visit the site, you will find a blog entry that presents a well-reasoned rationale as to why Apple should buy Tivo, but no hard news at all.
Subsequently, analyst Steven Kroll, Jr. (whose dad is a senior partner at the same firm) provided the "what we hear on the street" quote that Reuters served up.
No one seems to have bothered at all to trace this garbage to its specious sources.
I own some Tivo, and was watching all of this today because I was considering cutting my losses (this dog had lost one-third of its value in a month). Instead, I'm holding on and hoping for a short squeeze, or even the possibility that the rumors will alert video-on-demand competitors to what a bargain TIVO's 3 million subscribers would be for anyone seeking a toehold on the living room.
So, while it looks to me that the rumor is only that, I wouldn't be too surprised if it became reality.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
Too bad its probably not true, given the history of the rumor above.
l , and obviously they've also done the music portion.
My 1st generation TiVO is already a box that sits in my living room, connected to my stereo, from which I could play songs/videos pulled off my hard drive. An I'm running Mac OS X. Considering I ended up buying a second device to do just the music piece of this http://www.slimdevices.com/ if Apple came out with a new TiVo that did this plus movies, I'd have to seriously consider upgrading my TiVO.
Its inevitable and obvious that Apple was going to eventually build a device to serve as the home entertainmentcomputer connection. For one thing, Steve Jobs said so about 8 years ago. They already have the codec to use for the video portion: H.264/AVC http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/index.htm
Whether or not they do an iVideos store is probably moot in the end. TiVo is a success just doing broadcast TV, the real growth would be becoming the defacto standard for digital cable and satellite. TiVO hasn't really persued this, but I expect Apple might, there's nothing sacred about the settop box business, and Apple has already show willingness to license iPod to other vendors like HP/Motorola.
Nor does iVideos require broadband. DirecTV is already marketing cheap movies to PVR owners like myself. Come to think of it, even without broadband you could easily sell a service that was satellite based and offered you a menu of 100 different movies a month. After all, over pay per view, I already have a menu of about 25 movies/month, and the only reason its only 25 is because they repeat the movie all day long. With a Tivo, they would only have to broadcast a movie once.
Hmmm... The TiVo already has a modem, so it could connect to a master server, order any movie from a long list of movies, then get the movie downloaded in one burst via the satellite. Since multiple people could mooch off the same movie download, it might be possible to have a list of 1000 movies available. If you picked an obscure movie, you might have to wait 24 hours for a download slot to open. It would be inconvenient, but if new releases were instantaneous (since you could start in the middle of any running download), its proabably acceptable.
So say $500 for a new box that plugs into my existing video crap, lets me download from a list of 1000 movies over my satellite dish, replaces my sqeezebox for music (one less thing), stores all my DVDs for easy playback (less crap in the living room). In a word, hmm...
TiVO couldn't do it alone, but Apple and TiVO could do it together.