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."

Comments

It's surprising to me too!

[garcia]

More than 50 percent of TiVo's 3.6 million subscribers have tried TiVoToGo, and nearly half use it regularly, Denney said. The number of regular users was higher than TiVo expected, and "it was surprising to us, to be honest,'' he said.

Based on how slow the transfers are for Tivo2Go I too am surprised that Tivo has that many people using it. Granted, I was only using it over wireless but I assume that's what most of the Tivo2Go users are using as well. It was taking *more* than real-time to transmit a show to the computer and then I had to run it through Dr. Divx to bring it down to a resolution that would play well on my mobile device. Will this automated transcoding process increase the time it takes to put it on the handheld even more?

I have mentioned before that I use the "Record to VCR" option to put shows on my mobile device as I have an Archos that will automatically record it in the best fit option if I so choose... Yeah, it's real time and it's a pain but it was actually faster and easier than using Tivo2Go. Being that I've moved to the DirecTivo I no longer have the Tivo2Go option (with a stock unit) so I am happy to use Record to VCR for now.

Re:Mac software?

[BushCheney08]

Since the files will be converted to mp4 files, they should be playable on a Mac. Let's hope that they'll spend the next few months before rollout working on a Mac compatible version of TiVo Desktop so that you can actually do the conversion on one, too.

iPod and 'The Innovators Dilemma'

[rewinn]

iPod seems to be turning into the canonical example of attacking an industry leader from below, as detailed in Clayton M. Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail" a decade back.

In business computing, PCs broke the dominance of mainframes in the computing environment by introducing relatively cheap gadgets that were more expensive and less profitable per business function than the industry leaders, who quite logically ignored them; and then PCs crept up the functionality curve to wipe out the dinosaurs.

In autos, the Japanese starting importing cheap cars to the US that were less profitable that our domestic industry leaders, who quite logically failed to respond effectively. While GM etc always made cheap cars too, they didn't try to match Japan's cheap-and-good model; Toyota etc crept up the functionality curve nearly to wipe out the dinosaurs.

Now in computing: the iPod, started cheap, and is creeping up the functionality curve.

The question is, will the industry leaders recognize and respond effectively? Or rather, can they? I don't intend to be making a yet another cheap flame of the world's leading software company, which cannot be ignorant of the what's going on, but responding may require breaking their business model.