June 7, 2006 8:21 AM PDT
TiVo tunes in to Net downloads
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Through the new TiVoCast service, people can download broadband video clips to their TiVo boxes for free from a handful of Internet sites, such as woman-oriented iVillage, technology-focused CNET.com (a CNET News.com sister site), entertainment-grooved Heavy.com, The New York Times, the National Basketball Association and Women's National Basketball Association, and news and political video blog site Rocketboom.
TiVo began testing broadband video downloads last August, previewing "Greg the Bunny," "Hopeless Pictures" and "The Festival" before they debuted on the Independent Film Channel. That was later followed up in December with Rocketboom videos, which have been ongoing since then.
"Television is still the preferred platform for watching video," Tara Maitra, TiVo general manger of programming, said in a statement. "The TiVoCast service captures mainstream and specialty-based content on the Web, delivering
TiVo plans to expand the number of Web sites and videos it offers, Maitra added in a telephone interview, although there is no specific target for such launches.
Subscribers will be able to access the content through the Showcases area of TiVo Central, using a TiVo Series2 DVR box connected to a broadband connection.
TiVo and its partners plan to make money by integrating advertising within the content. That could bode well for TiVo, which has been
TiVo's broadband service comes as greater headway is being made in the development of Internet Protocol television (IPTV). AT&T, for example, is planning a
TiVo, meanwhile, has developed software and a user interface that can be used with IPTV. This technology would help subscribers organize and navigate through programming that may be offered via IPTV in the future.
However, TiVo is still figuring out how this technology will be used with the broadband video clips, Maitra said.
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Current and former TiVo engineers I know have been extremely disappointed with their management's poor performance, and there has been a brain drain going on for quite a while. As usual, the smartest rats jump ship before the dimmer or less experienced ones do, and the more senior ones are still hoping against hope that their $80 IPO stock options might someday be worth something (but the stock price has been down in the single digits pretty much ever since the IPO, so it would take a miracle for them to be worth anything again).
The gradual loss of new DirecTV subscribers, expensive work on integrating with cable set-top boxes (which should have happened long before integrated DVD players/recorders), and flailing by their marketing weenies, who keep overruling engineers' priorities for fixing hundreds of bugs that consumers have been screaming about for years (there are several hundred "must-fix" bugs that engineers have been begging to be allowed to fix, but their words just get drowned out by the marketing weenie wish-list blathering) are taking their toll, and there just doesn't seem to be any path to long-term profitability, especially now that everyone and their brother is offering DVR technology, although pretty much all of it is inferior to TiVo's ease of use and reliability. However, by not charging up-front for the hardware, and bundling it into a cable or satellite package bill, the pain of the extra cost is wrapped in a nice sedative.
At least this is better news than the seemingly endless recent partnership announcements about how you will be able to do things like program your TiVo over your cell phone. It just may be too late for IPTV to make much of a difference for TiVo.
All the Best,
Joe Blow
Yeah, they should keep lifetime service (which I have) and EVERY company has room for improvement -- but it's still head-and-shoulders above anything else out there.