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Yahoo! Plans to Connect Services With Tivo
Mango Man writes "According to the NY Times, Yahoo! and Tivo plan to connect their services to help differentiate themselves in their respective markets. The first feature offered will be modest: Tivo users will be able to find programs in Yahoo!'s listings and send them to Tivo to record." Ladies and gentlemen, begin your merger rumours!
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
How will Yahoo know to send the info to MY TiVo? Will there be a mechanism in place to prevent me from sending record instructions to someone else's TiVo? Most importantly, can I get around those restrictions?
:-)
I mean, I wouldn't WANT to set my buddy's TiVo to fill up its 80 hours with The Horse Porn Channel, but it might at some point become necessary...
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
For a company that has been teetering on the brink of obsolescence for some time now, this is great news. Like the iPod, TiVo's real edge over its competitors comes from their spectacular user interface design. Even the most non-technical of my friends and family are able to figure out TiVo easily, and the remote is a triumph of engineering. Generic DVRs are killing them, though. As a Comcast subscriber, I am granted the deep displeasure of occasionally having to use their remote and their menus. I pity those who have to use Comcast's DVR as well.
TiVo is not only a well-designed product, it's an undervalued entity. TiVo has a smart, net-connected box in the living room; this is where every media company wants to be. I'm surprised it's taken this long for a big company to get in on the action. My TiVo ought to be downloading trailers for every movie in theaters, displaying show times, and letting me buy the ticket. It should be aggregating my RSS feeds. It should have an embedded BitTorrent client that downloads the latest video feed of This Week In Tech. When I watch an episode of The Simpsons from Now Playing, there should be a link to buy the DVD box set from Amazon. The only way TiVo will survive is by embracing convergence concepts. Hopefully this partnership with Yahoo! is the first step in this direction.
domain combinatorics
Go to the Yahoo TV listings. Click on a show and look for "You can record this program to your TiVo.". Click on the Learn More Link to register for the service.
Kage_
Don't have a Tivo, but wondered, does it require a separate internet connection or does it get the listings through the cable, like digital cable does? Either way, how long until there's some exploit and everyone has to start patching their Tivo on a weekly basis? Tivo antivirus, Tivo firewall. Surely there's enough storage and processing power inside one to be useful to someone who controls a couple thousand of them...
This is very strategic and potentially very market-disruptive.
There are any number of players trying to deliver video over the internet -- the Yahoo guy in charge of their video was quoted by the NYT as saying that we will have an unlimited number of channels in the future. The NBC Nightly news is going on-line. Major-league baseball has been streaming games all season. Every media company in the world would love the ability to sell directly to consumers without having to go through Blockbuster, DirectTV or cable pay-per-view. But, as long as the picture shows up on a computer screen and not on a TV screen, it'll be a niche market. But, if the same 36-in TV that you watched 'Lost' on ABC can be used to watch the 'Lost' you got from itunes, well, that's a different story. Tivo is perfectly positioned to allow this to happen.
One big problem with this is bandwidth. Unfortunately, the people who lose by having more TV go over the Internet are the same ones who control bandwidth. Is your cable TV company going to say "Hey. Let's take some of the bandwidth that we're using to provide high-profit pay-per-view video and use it to fatten our Internet pipes instead"? Ideally, they'd be forced to by their competitors, but the main competition to cable modems is DSL, and all the phone companies are trying to do video as well.
As much as I would love to get excited about this and hope that it gives me new things to play with on my Tivo, I'm doubtful. Tivo already has their home media extensions library where apps on a computer can publish themselves on the network and display custom screens on the Tivo. From what i've seen so far, cool things can be done but it's very hard to make the interface useable.
The highly regarded tivo interface already seems to be falling apart. They're trying to tack on too many sources for additional ad revenue. The main screen usually has two extra advertising items, which by no surprise are the ones that stand out the most. They're desperately trying to add on features to make the tivo more of a home media box than just a tv recorder. Which is cool, but they must have fired all their original developers and outsourced to india or something, cause the new features feel like tacked-on afterthoughts.
For example, there's a cool new feature that will share a directory on your PC with video files so that it shows up in Tivo's now playing list. Very cool, until you try using it. First off, the files need to be in a format the tivo understands, and I can't fault them for that, it'd be hard to allow the tivo to decode every possible codec. Although, if they're serious about this home media thing, they really should at least try. I think it'll just play MPEG right now. Second, once you locate a video you'd like to watch, selecting it and hitting play doesn't play it. You need to first select the video so that you see the details, then you need to select "Transfer this video". After doing this, you will be given an option of watching it while it transfers, but on my 802.11b wireless network, the transfer isn't anywhere near fast enough to watch on the fly. Trying to do so seems to confuse the tivo, since this whole watching as a show downloads from the network feature is really just a crappy hack. If you do wait for the transfer, you can then watch the show, but it's now taking up space on your tivo, so what's the freaking point of having it on your PC?
I'm sorry for getting a bit sidetracked on one particular feature, but I think it's indicative of a growing trend over at Tivo. They're trying to make a feature list instead of a good product. All the new features that sound really cool, starting with Tivo ToGo, end up working like total crap. I still can't transfer videos recorded on my tivo to my mac without hacking to the tivo. It's been almost a year.
So I guess what I'm trying to say with this rant is don't bother getting excited about this. It'll just be a few tacked on a features that nobody will ever use because they're just a kludge implementation so that they can list it as a feature on their website.
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