TiVo to Aim for PC Desktop

Dave writes "Ars Technica has reported on TiVo's fourth quarter earnings call, and I was interested to see that the company is looking at providing some kind of desktop service for computers." The details are pretty sparse, so it'll be intriguing to see what they've got planned.

Comments

over my dead body

[Anonymous Coward]

TiVo to Aim for PC Desktop

Not if I aim it out the window first.

Pretty cool!

[Prophetic_Truth]

So its like a pay BT site?

Tivo the Content Provider?

[fredistheking]

This could help them to overcome the big advantage that the cable and satellite companies have going for them.

Why?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

I don't use a TiVo, but my understanding is that you use this machine to record stuff for playback when you have the time to relax. Do you really want to go relax in front of a desktop PC?

Re:Why?

[tmleafsar]

No different than most people's average day at the office. ;-)

Re:Why?

[westlake]

Do you really want to go relax in front of a desktop PC?

So what are you doing here?

Why would you?

[Manip]

Tivo costs £10 per month to get guide information... Or you could buy Microsoft Media Centre edition, costs you £89 up front but you get the guide information for free forever plus you can hack it (using any x86 tools).

Re:Why would you?

[FredThompson]

Or...you could use free applications and not buy Microsoft Media Center. Duh!

TiVo's load balancing, season passes, key phrase searches, etc. kick the snot out of anything else. Quite a bit of what makes it so nice is patented.

If you haven't used one, you don't have the experience to know you don't know what you don't know.

Re:Why would you?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"If you haven't used one, you don't have the experience to know you don't know what you don't know."

I've used TiVo for over four years now, both standalone and the combo DirecTV/TiVo units.

I can assure you that Microsoft MCE is every bit as good as TiVo. To-do-list, recording history, season passes (with first-run-only options, the same 31-day rule, automatic adjustment to changing schedules, etc.), and most of the other TiVo featureset is present.

The only things I can think of that TiVo has over MCE is:

- WishLists. MCE kind of has them with keyword searching, but TiVo does a much better job.

- Suggestions. I never used them, but only TiVo has them.

But:

- MCE has better conflict resolution. The interface is clearer. The to-do-list shows, at a glance, which shows "lose out" in a conflict.

- MCE is faster. Even the Series 2 units are far too slow. Particularly when you upgrade the disk space. My 300GB MCE box is still quite nippy.

- MCE has a better skip back / skip forward feature. It's far faster, which actually makes it useful - unlike the :30 hack on TiVo.

- MCE handles failure better. If a show is interrupted during recording, MCE will automatically schedule a later showing if it's available and doesn't cause a conflict. This happens even if the recording was one-shot.

- MCE softpads automatically, and unlike TiVo's padding, softpadding doesn't create conflicts.

- MCE's interface is better. You can see the current program in most of the menus, and there is a clearly defined "back" button with unlimited history.

Try MCE out before you go crapping all over it. You may be surprised.

Re:Why would you?

[FredThompson]

"MCE has better conflict resolution. The interface is clearer."

Aples and oranges? Clearer...how? There's only so much information which can fit on a TV screen. If you don't like the appearance created by the TiVo, load a custom skin.

"The to-do-list shows, at a glance, which shows "lose out" in a conflict."

Same issue. There's only so much text which will fit on a TV display. Displaying conflicts on a TV very quickly becomes overwhelmingly cumbersome.

If you want to do it via PC, use one of the flavors of DailyMail. DailyMail will let you manually tweak conflict resolution via email. If you want to do mass deletions, reorganize season passes, etc., use TivoWebPlus modules. It would be ludicrous to compare a handheld remote system to a PC interface.

"- MCE is faster. Even the Series 2 units are far too slow. Particularly when you upgrade the disk space. My 300GB MCE box is still quite nippy."

Too slow for what? I have 3 DTiVos, each has 2 160G drives and the only time I see any speed issues are when 2 recordings are being made on a DTiVo, a stream is being extracted across the NIC and I'm trying to do something data9intensive like reorganize season passes. Use TWP to do mass jobs or stream to a PC, no biggie.

"- MCE has a better skip back / skip forward feature. It's far faster, which actually makes it useful - unlike the :30 hack on TiVo."

It takes less than 2 minutes to edit all the ads from a 1-hour recording after extracting to my PC. Any remote control method of skipping around is going to take longer than that.

You know you can push the left or right-facing triangle keys on a TiVo remote more than once, don't you?

"- MCE handles failure better."

Uh...no. MCE runs on Windoze which is far less stable than the Linux running on a TiVo.

" If a show is interrupted during recording, MCE will automatically schedule a later showing if it's available and doesn't cause a conflict. This happens even if the recording was one-shot."

Let's unpack that sentence.

The first part describes a TiVo season pass or wishlist for which you've enbled the options to record more than one showing. That's been in TiVo software from the beginning.

The second part of your statement is impossible in linear time. If a show is on once and your recorder fails, be it MCE, Myth, TiVo, DVDR, VCR, whatever, it is impossible to recover the signal which is no longer available.

"- MCE softpads automatically, and unlike TiVo's padding, softpadding doesn't create conflicts."

Did you really think that as you typed? It is impossible for any tuner to record more than one channel at a time. Padding extends the recording of a channel beyond the match in the schedule data. MCE most certainly is NOT capable of somehow recording multiple channels per tuner concurrently, nor can it record linearly temporal broadcasts in a non-linear manner.

"- MCE's interface is better. You can see the current program in most of the menus,"

Do you mean video overlay? It's not that difficult to inhibit playback of the looping backgrounds on a TiVo. That's been available for more than a year.

" and there is a clearly defined "back" button with unlimited history."

Why would that be useful? At some point, it's more efficient to re-enter from a top-level menu. If you're trying to do something which is inherently awkward with a remote control, use one of the web interfaces.

"Try MCE out before you go crapping all over it. You may be surprised."

I might be pleasantly surprised by a few interface aspects but it's not something I'd chose. The more non-critical functionality packed into what is essentially a timed recorder, the greater the chance that recorder will fail its primary function. TiVos run Linux and are stable unless you're using a primitive hack to disable encryption. Mine have been running for more than a year, in one case 3 years, without reboots except when there were power outages. The only thing which I would find to be a major advantage would be if the TiVos suported wireless keyboards so searching by show name could be done quicker.

It already exists!

[TanRanger]

Long time TiVo competitor, ReplayTV, has had a PC interface for some time now by means of an open source JAVA program called DVArchive. With it, user's of LAN enabled ReplayTV's can stream recorded shows onto their PC's. DVArchive can even act as a virtual ReplayTV, serving up shows for all the real ones in the house. If this is what TiVo has planned, it sounds like they are playing catch-up.

Re:It already exists!

[dhakbar]

You can believe him, he knows all five customers!

3 Words

[jimmyCarter]

Burn to DVD

Could it be, downloadable TV??

[jimson]

All the "thoughts" that I've seen thus far here about what Tivo is up to amount to a TV tuner card. Come on /. Think outside the box a bit. Maybe they're getting into the content delivery game. Downloadable episodes!!

Don't think PC, think media PC!

[Statecraftsman]

TiVo is smart to be thinking of other revenue sources but I don't think the PC is going to bring them much. I have a TV capture card and the ability to record shows on the computer. It's cool to catch the end of a show or something but it doesn't touch TiVo.

The nice thing they have going for them is that it's hooked into the home entertainment system. You can record and playback all on your couch. When they move to the computer, they lose the oh-so-powerful couch comfort factor and most of their users.

I'd really like to see TiVo go more in the direction of the media pc that everyone wants...the one that hooks into ethernet and plays mp3 and videos off a shared network drive. They've got a great interface for media playback and they'd do really well to extend it's reach beyond broadcast and into your personal media store.

TiVo, forget the PC and extend your foothold in a way that makes sense for your current users!

Dr Dobbs

[Anonymous Coward]

Dobbs has an article about a Home Media Engine that can be activated in all the Series 2 Tivo's that allow you to build you own applications to run on the Tivo. I, of course, didn't read the article completely yet, but it sounds like they deliver a SDK for you to develop Java applications . You have to buy the mag, but the following is a link to the article.

http://www.ddj.com/articles/2005/0503/

Building on TiVo
Arthur van Hoff, Adam Doppelt
The Home Media Engine lets you build TiVo applications that integrate seamlessly with the familiar TiVo user experience.

Re:It's gonna be tough!

[s.o.terica]

1) DirecTV boxes with TiVo have supported recording two channels at once for several years. The new HD DirecTiVo actually has four tuners -- two HD DirecTV and two OTA HD. It can even record two shows while watching a third show live. So the issue of recording two shows is not an architectural one, rather just a limitation of the current hardware.

2) Most people who don't have DirecTV (or competing Dish Network) and have interest in DVRs also have cable, and more and more of the channels available on cable are available only as digital channels, which means it does you absolutely no good to have two tuners built-into your KnoppMyth box (or your Media Center PC, etc.) if you want to record anything on a digital cable channel. TiVo knows this, and understands that even if it were possible for the connected IR blaster to distinguish between two digital cable boxes, it would be out of the question to ask an average consumer to set up a system with two separate cable boxes connected to the same DVR, controlled with different IR blasters.

3) TiVo has said repeatedly that they will support multiple channel recording for cable once the cable industry stops dragging its feet and releases two-way CableCard, which will work to allow TiVo to decrypt the digital signals, therefore eliminating the huge hassle of the separate cable box (just like they did with the hassle of a separate DirecTV box). But unfortunately the cable companies have a conflict of interest in wanting to be able to lock consumers into their crappy DVR boxes for as long as possible, so they're more than happy to fight CableCard as long as they can.

Conclusion? It's really not TiVo's fault that you can't record more than one channel at once if you have cable. If you are upset at the vertical monopoly the cable companies are creating with this behavior, contact them and your federal lawmakers.

The most logical service...Ultimate Share-A-Show.

[Alpha_Traveller]

The most logical service at this point in terms of what to add, that would be a leapfrog over just about everyone, would definitely be a distribution service based on something TIVO's already mentioned with the outside world.

Share-a-show Technology.

Basically under the concept of 'networking' and community. It's already been established that with Tivo-To-Go, it's expected you'll share shows with your family and friends.

NOW -- Take that a step farther. Suppose I get 50 people who all like Trek. Each person can share a particular trek episode with 6 people. So, you decide how many of the six 'burned' copies of Trek Episode 5 you're going to want to distribute among those 50 people who watch trek. If 9 people out of that 50 want to share, you've got more than enough copies of trek to go around. How do we get our very own copy to view? Well gee, I connect my tivo to the trek community. What do I get back? A list of every single Trek episode I can now download.

This beats HBO on demand when you don't have HBO. Of course it might be restricted by what you're subscribed to via your cable/satellite company but you'd basically be able to download off broadband your favorite shows. Things your single tivo just couldn't get because you could only tape one or two things at a time. Your favorite shows, any show on demand just so long as their Tivo (or computer) was online, was on broadband and had some distribution tokens left.