TiVo Buys Super Secret Strangeberry

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TiVo Buys Super Secret Strangeberry

Slashdot has a story about how TiVo has purchased a company called Strangeberry. There isn't anything on their website aside from news of the acquisition but they're reportedly in the broadband services business.

This may be a shot of one of their products, and if it is I would trust the description to be true as well. I've heard of a few Silicon Valley startups that were producing home broadband boxes that did everything from act as a firewall and wirless router, to home filesharing and IM, to callerID/tv/movie/weather updates on your TV, all in one simple box running a linux port. It would seem like a great move for TiVo to pick something up like that and bake it into their boxes, making TiVo customers less likely to jump ship for a free PVR from a cable company.

by Matt Haughey January 26, 2004 in News

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You know what would keep me on board with Tivo, Matt? Tell me how to fix the 'bad channel change' problem I've had ever since getting the box two plus years ago. Aluminum foil over the IR pieces definitely helps but I still loose 10-20% of the shows I schedule for recording.

Posted by: BillSaysThis at Jan 26, 2004 11:22:57 AM

Bill,

If you're getting a 10-20% error then it sounds like you have the wrong code. Some codes *kind of* work with some boxes, but are not the correct ones. If you've already done a full tent over the front of the cable box - covering the IR receiver and the emitters - and you have it set to Slow speed, and you still get that many errors - I'd really try other codes. That error rate is just unheard of. I used to get errors sometimes with my old AT&T Broadband motorola boxes - but well under 1%. I've had Charter Scientific Atlanta 2k boxes for over a year and a half now using 'Fast' switching with 0 errors to date. I'm a regular on the TiVolovers LJ community, alt.video.ptv.tivo, several Yahoo TiVo groups, and I visit TiVoCommunity. If this were common there'd be screaming all over. As it is posts about channel change problems are few and far between.

Posted by: MegaZone at Jan 26, 2004 12:57:47 PM

I was having channel change problems with my standalone TiVo via IR hooked up to a DirecTV tuner. Once I changed the speed from Fast to Medium all the problems went away.

Posted by: Jeffrey at Jan 26, 2004 2:29:07 PM

Thanks for the feedback guys. I switched from medium to slow, will see if that makes much difference. When I first was having the problem (and the box), I called Tivo Support and while on the phone with a tech experimented with a number of different box codes, 10042 was the best we could find. I might have exaggerated on the extent of the problem but am just upset when several shows in a 24 hour period don't get recorded due to this issue.

Posted by: BillSaysThis at Jan 27, 2004 8:51:13 AM

I get the problem when my blinds are open and the sun is coming in. If I close the blinds, the problem goes away. I have to remember to close them before I leave for work in the morning, otherwise it doesn't get anything until the sun goes down.

Posted by: dom b at Jan 27, 2004 1:55:48 PM

Just to get the story straight, the boxes in the picture on my site (that you link to in your article, as did Slashdot) are similar to the ones that were featured in this week's PC World. There's nothing secret about these devices: they connect your tv to your home network. As I understand, they were seen all over this year's CES. What I wrote below in the original (Dutch) posting was that the Strangeberry guys drove to Fry's one day to buy the components to build these kind of devices. And that they managed to do so pretty quickly; meaning that these are smart guys and also that there's not much of a barrier to entry in this market - providing there is a market. I never meant to imply or infer that these were the kind of machines Strangeberry was actually developing as their core business, just that they are working on technology for this space. As the official Tivo statement says: 'Strangeberry has created technology (...) designed to enable the development of new broadband-based content delivery services.' And as you can judge by the resumes of the Strangeberry guys, they are software specialists, not hardware guys. Just to be clear: I am not associated with Strangeberry in any way. I am just a friend of Arthur's, as I wrote on my personal blog about the acquisition of Smartberry by Tivo. Please see http://www.frackers.com/2003/11/10/000035.html for all the clickable links. Thanks, Michiel

Posted by: Michiel Frackers at Jan 27, 2004 7:40:21 PM

Strangeberry released a java version of Rendezvous/Zeroconf. It actually works. The code is now open at sourceforge. I've used the code and the discovery works well, even under windows.

Having something like Rendezvous/Zeroconf working for Tivo is key to making it even simpler to intergrate a Tivo into a home network.

Simpler to use = deeper consumer penetration

Posted by: Michael at Jan 28, 2004 1:09:45 AM

I check out the picture from the frackers.com link and all those devices are Media Adapters. The one on the left apears to be the SMC media adapter, the one on the middle is the Play@TV, and the one one on the right is the Linksys Wireless-B media adapter. All in all in big deal. Unless, TiVo is planning on creating a compatible Media Adapter for there products, which would be very cool.

Posted by: Alexander Grundner at Jan 30, 2004 11:42:15 AM

I NEED DIRECTV TIVO HELP, DOES ANONE KNOW WHY A BOX WOLD POWER UP THEN SHUT ITSELF OFF AFTER ABOUT 2 MINUTES? AND IF SO, HOW DO I FIX IT?

Posted by: SHAWNA at Mar 8, 2008 5:38:53 PM

TiVo Buys Super Secret Strangeberry

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