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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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How can this not be a good idea? A decent PVR setup (with hardware acceleration) has been missing for the MacOS platform. Even though there are software options, they require heavy duty hardware and because there is no hardware acceleration, even a G5 takes a bit of crunching to perform compressions and such. Also, given Apple's video compression technologies such as Pixlet would make ideal means for encoding video for later replay, say on the plane or some such downtime.
Of course the business analysis will make the ultimate determination of whether or not Apple is willing to make the move, (and Tivo has been losing money), but if any company can make it work, while showing the MPAA and equivalent TV organization a past history of success in media with iTunes, Apple is it. Come on, how would you like to in addition to the traditional PVR duties, be able to pull up TV episodes of old series that are not being shown, even in syndication? Or have a truly "on demand" movie library of all sorts, not just the popular canned options that cable companies think will be most profitable?
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If anyone can figure this one out it's Apple. Tivo is an amazing product, it just needs to be managed properly. Apple seems to be pretty good at that these days.
Or how would you like to ride in an aircar to your destination, or 'micro-wave' all of your food?
As usual, good ideas never live up to the reality and the problem here isn't so cut and dried. CONTENT is the issue. All I see Apple gaining is the TiVO name (which in and of itself isn't a bad thing). Content suppliers are the ones who will have to meet consumers halfway and if what's been going on with the DMCA, Broadcast Flag, and other nonsense, I don't see this changing.
Now... If Apple decides to take chances and 'loophole' solutions to let their consumers do what they want with the content - THAT would be interesting. So far, it appears the consumer electronics industry as a whole is rolling over when challenged by the likes of the RIAA and MPAA.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
A cursory glance certainly highlights pros of an Apple/TiVo merger:
.AAC but for video) to restrict transfer of video to approved "devices" such as other TiVo units or portable accessories.
1. Mac mini can be a TiVo unit (just use the S-Video out adapter for your TV set). Although it'll need a TV card (wish they'd come out with something like the Hauppauge Nexus-S satellite TV card).
2. Next generation iPod Photo will probably be iPod Video with content that can be transferred from your TiVo unit (the Mac mini) to your iPod Video portable unit.
3. Apple is probably not happy with just distributing music media (via its iTunes store) but is looking to the future to also provide downloadable video content via an "iVideo" store--what better way to do that than to buy the TiVo customer base and offer them this content.
4. Apple can ensure that the saved video content has the right digital stamps (a la
The one downside I see in this merger is that Apple will probably concentrate less and less on the service of "timeshifting" (i.e. drop it entirely), unless they can ensure that users have a right to that material. READ: unless the bigwigs of TV land is happy about how Apple handles digital rights management of timeshifted/saved content. Although timeshifting and saving media for later viewing is currently acceptable, the logical path that this technology leads to, is the ability to share that content or make it portable--something that is not yet acceptable among Hollywood and the TV networks.
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