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TiVoToGo For iPods and PSPs
BushCheney08 writes "According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, TiVo is expanding its TiVoToGo service to allow recordings to be viewed on video iPods and PSPs. Files will be transcoded in real time and will include digital watermarks to try to cut down on piracy. The service begins beta-testing for select subscribers today, with a widespread rollout scheduled for early next year. An AP article is also available at Forbes."
Too bad they never added Tivo To Go For Macintosh, and I doubt they will ever add this feature to Macs either. Nice to be a second or even 3rd class citizen when it comes to Tivo because i own a mac.
"...will include digital watermarks to try to cut down on piracy. "
That's what I like to hear. Honestly, they'll never eliminate it because there will be the people that just won't pay, but if there was a distribution system (that offered better than 128kbps), was reasonably priced, and offered less restrictive DRM, the general public would have little incentive to pirate. The only things keeping me from buying legal tracks are the DRM and the bitrate. I don't even mind the dollar a song because I'm not getting filler tracks that I would get on a CD.
Anyway...I'm rambling...
I'm not sure I'd consider this a flame, but it seems unreasonable to compare this scenario to the bizarre need to constantly have access to a phone. (Don't get me wrong -- I have a mobile phone. I just turn it off sometimes. But I digress.)
Like a bunch of people, I travel for work. I spend at least 5 hours every week on a plane. That's airtime, excluding time sitting around the airport or going back and forth to the airport. And I know many, many people who take 45-minute train rides to work. Personally, when I'm home I want to do stuff that I can only do when I'm home -- taking some shows with me to kill 5 or 6 hours while I'm traveling is pretty convenient. I kill some dead time and regain some free time at home.
Currently, I do that with my laptop, but an iPod with video would allow me to catch up on some shows in the gate area or during my 40-minute cab ride, not have to juggle my laptop when my meal arrives on the flight, and still watch stuff in the limited space I get on small regional jets. I'm not sold on the new iPod yet -- I'll probably wait another generation and hopefully the screen will get a little bigger.
So TiVo will let us transfer shows to our iPods. This is the same TiVo that already makes their DVRs will obey the Broadcast Flag despite no federal legislation ever mandating such compliance. Seems to me that Disney, the WB, and every other studio will simply flag all their broadcasts as Do Not Record, blocking such free attempts to provide content to one's iPod and PSP and requiring these shows to be purchased. Therefore this announcement therefore amounts to NOTHING!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Transfers from Tivos seem to be slow whatever you use. I have a series 1 Tivo with mfs_ftp installed on it. I transfer over 100BaseT. The harddrive is a year old 72000 RPM drive, so it's not slow. Downloading from the Tivo I see about 1 Mbs. Uploading shows back to the Tivo I see 140-150 Kbs. It takes me 5-6 hours to put an hour show back on to the Tivo! So I think the problem lies somewhere within the Tivo, and not with the transfer software (be it mfs_ftp or Tivo2Go).