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Announcing: HME.pvrblog.com

The first question I had for Howard Look at TiVo when I heard about the new HME launch today was "is there some sort of gallery/forum that I can go to find the best apps or share apps I build?" His answer was basically no, but they were hopeful that someone could put something together. I pinged a few friends and eventually George Hotelling, who has been posting here, put something together.

I give you: http://hme.pvrblog.com/

Our goals were to get a place where we could have a categorical list of applications, a way to rate those apps, the ability to add screenshots, and a forum area to discuss each app and topics in general. I encourage any new HME app developers that want others using, rating, and commenting on your work to get the word out by uploading them to our new site.

January 31, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

TiVo's Home Media Engine launched

As reported at CES earlier this month, TiVo's new developer-friendly package, dubbed Home Media Engine (HME), launches today. I got to chat with Howard Look, VP of TiVo Application Software and User Experience a couple days ago about it, and here are the main points about today's rollout:

• Developer Toolkit available at Sourceforge starting today: http://tivohme.sourceforge.net/
• Toolkit includes a sandbox TiVo emulator app you can run on your desktop to test applications against
• Developer backdoor password that enables HME (will require that you have the new TiVo 7.1 OS)
• You can now code simple games, audio applications, video applications, and utilities in Java that will run on your computer and communicate with any TiVo with the backdoor enabled on your network (you can share your code with others if they want to run the apps too)
• Developer contest announced, to award the best apps developed in the next few months
• Included sample apps include a simple game, a RSS reader, and a weather app

Not much that they didn't allude to at CES, but great to see it out just a couple weeks later. As I've said before, I believe embracing developers and letting them extend TiVo is one of the ways to keep TiVo ahead of the PVR pack. I see an explosion of cool apps coming really soon that will tie the web closer into every TiVo.

Keep in mind this is a developer release, and the first apps will probably be buggy and slow, but I'm sure the best apps will eventually migrate to everyone's TiVo. They're launching with the audio and photo app support (no video for now, but will come soon and may support transcoding any video to your tivo). The audio and photo demo apps I saw at CES were full blown custom interfaces, and I can't wait to see audio clients for Shoutcast streams, Live365, and the Internet Archive, and photo apps for Flickr and Ofoto someday soon.

This new package should open up a whole new world of cool apps for TiVos. Record labels could have showcases for their bands, photographers could show off their best work to friends, and someday soon, folks will be able to stream video on demand, over the net, to their TiVos. A few months from now, I'm sure there will be hundreds if not thousands of HME apps for your TiVo -- I predict some exciting times ahead for TiVo owners.

Update: We've launched hme.pvrblog.com!

January 31, 2005 in News, TiVo | Permalink | Comments (20) | TrackBack

NY Times - Steal This Show

The New York Times does a wide-ranging article on PVR technologies including profiles on the technologies and people behind  BitTorrent, Videora, MythTV, and KnoppMyth. 

First popularized by TiVo and ReplayTV about five years ago, the DVR gave consumers a new degree of control: instead of being at the mercy of the broadcast schedule or VCR's, they could now be their own television programmers, scheduling shows at their convenience, pausing live television and skipping easily past commercials. Smith Barney estimates that though only a little more than 6 million Americans now use DVR's, by 2010 nearly half of American television households, or 58 million homes, will have them.

The article also touches upon the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Television Liberation Digital Front which is working towards defeating the FCC's broadcast flag, which will restrict ways in which media content can be used.

The article closes with some quotes from television company executives, who are planning for a pay-per-view future, think that people will pay $1 per TV show (without commercials) and $.50 per TV show (with commercials.)  What do you think about the future of TV viewing and pay-per-view?  Would you pay per show?

The New York Times> Steal This Show

Thanks to the New York Times Link Generator for a weblog-safe link.

January 30, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (28) | TrackBack

Free TiVo (after rebates)

No, this isn't one of those annoying chain-spams.  CompUSA is offering $100 rebates on TiVo boxes when you spend more than $500 on other electronics.  Combine that with with TiVo's $100 rebate to make a $200 40 hour Series 2 cost $FREE — after however long it takes the rebates to arrive.  This deal is only good through tomorrow, January 29th, so you'll have to impulse buy that new computer to get the rebate.  Oh, and that new computer you wanted to impulse buy?  Sorry, the deal doesn't apply to Apples.

CNet's got the scoop (and they just published this today too, so no blaming us for only giving you a day's notice).

[Update: High Five? Up high.  Down low?  Too slow.  The deal's over.  See what happens when you don't spend your weekend watching PVRblog for updates?]

January 28, 2005 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (1)

early adopters do not a market make

Om Malik has a bunch of links to new survey data that supports information we have known for quite some time.

A lot of people laughed at Steve Jobs when he introduced a hard-drive based music player nearly three years after the competitors introduced his. But his timing was right. It is the same issue at work here - TiVo and its ilk came out too soon. The Ipsos study finds that people would rather get a DVR from their cable or satellite (or soon telephone) company than buy a standalone product.

Om Malik on Broadband » We Like TiVo, Just Don’t Want To Buy It

January 27, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack

A sleepy DISH Network receiver

My friend Meg has posted about her problems with a DISH Network receiver, where after four hours of inactivity, it puts itself to sleep and her TiVo can't record anything. I know having an external TiVo hooked up to another DVR may be a rare use case, but it is a weird issue and Dish techs have told her non-DVR versions do the same thing to conserve energy and wear and tear, even though a TiVo needs 24/7 access to the stream. Anyone that has ever experienced it or found a way around it is encouraged to leave a comment on her site.

January 26, 2005 in Q & A | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Engadget how-to: Turn your Mac mini into a media center

Engadget has a pretty good and complete how to on turning a Mac mini into a media center that covers all the connections necessary, storage needs, and software you could use to control it. A great start and look into the possibilities the new unit offers.

January 25, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Google Video Search

Google launched video search tonight and doing a quick Google Video Search for TiVo shows you that it's pretty good at pulling out all the mentions of the company in the 24 hour news cycle. Lots of little news shows showing up in the screenshots. It goes beyond simply search through transcripts and actually shows screengrabs of when the words were mentioned. Does this mean Google has a Myth or TiVo farm somewhere in the Bay Area, sucking down every single channel's video to index for the search engine?

I can't wait to see this new thing grow -- hopefully someday soon all that video will be one click away to view. Maybe they could even become an iTunes Movie Store and sell shows/movies too?

January 24, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBack

Why Hasn't TiVo Improved?

It's not too hard to find a daily essay predicting the demise of TiVo, but they're not all bad. Ed Felten is convinced it was due to product stagnation while TiVo spun their wheels making deals with networks, which is a popular criticism. Essentially no major feature was deployed in 2004 to the OS, but 2005 looks promising with loads of new features (hopefully the developer API lets a million add-ons bloom).

Felten notes TiVo is looking to a new CEO that focuses even less on technology, which is disheartening news, but commenters on Felten's site rightfully point out when ReplayTV worked on innovative technology, they were sued into bankruptcy.

I believe the reasons are a bit of both. TiVo certainly has stagnated and appeared to have their hands tied behind their back for the past couple years, though I sense a reawakening. But I also believe TiVo held back time and time again because they spent so much time wrestling with the movie industry and the TV networks (and it looks like the cable companies are still dragging their feet on CableCARD support).

Lawsuits are killing innovation. It's a common story in the world of technology. Any time a company produces a disruptive technology that does something cool, they have to have a legal department that is bigger than their engineering unit to survive, and that sucks for business, sucks for customers, and sucks for the technology industry. I work around lawyers all day and I wish this was a bigger issue with the public.

Anything that helps customers enjoy TV, movies, or music is a target for lawsuits. We saw it with the Rio mp3 player (what, exactly, was illegal about playing a mp3 on a portable player?). We saw it with ReplayTV and TiVo. We see it in the entire DVD region-coding disaster that gets region-free players pulled from the US Market. The content company dinosaurs are so wed to their antiquated business models that they'll send off their legal department to attack at the slightest provocation (this includes imagined potential profit losses).

At this point, TiVo has a lot of customers and a lot of supporters in the US. I believe if anything, they need to move more of their resources into technology innovation and damn the torpedoes -- continue to make technology that makes customers happy, regardless of what Hollywood thinks. I believe if there is a concerted effort by the content industry to kill TiVo, it would not be successful like it was with ReplayTV, as there are just too many (happy, well-off, voting) TiVo customers to grapple with, much less the court of opinion that rarely goes to Hollywood's advantage.

TiVo, every day it's looks more and more like you're finally on the ropes, but it's time to start fighting back.

January 21, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (38)

But on the plus side: TiVoToGo Hacks Already Abound

It turns out that, along with TiVoToGo, another thing added by the upgrade to version 7.1 of the operating system is a built-in webserver. From the looks of things, the functionality it offers is limited to browsing the Now Playing list (screenshot) and downloading recordings off the box (which are still encrypted with the TiVo's media access key); there's also an XML feed of the Now Playing information, and someone's already written a tool to parse it with PHP. (Of course, given that online, remote scheduling can be done via Tivo Central Online, that's a feature that's not really needed onboard the box itself.)  I'm sure that there are other goodies hidden in there, just waiting for someone with command-line access to their TiVo to discover them.

Another positive development is that the TiVo Community is already going over the video/DVD format with a fine-toothed comb even though the update is only a couple weeks old. While Sonic did release the DVD burning program, it seems folks figured out one way of converting the files to a standard DVD format and burning with anything. This post explains how the video codec interacts with Windows, and how any DirecShow aware editor may be able to access the video files.

What's cool about both the webserver and file conversion news is that I'm happy to see TiVo adopting features and functionality seen in the "hacker underground" tools like TiVoWebPlus, which offer quite a number of features that I've long wished TiVo would adopt in their OS.

Of course, there is some debate on the boards over what is and isn't legal, and what folks should and shouldn't be sharing (PVRblog authors are debating the same issues, which is unfortunate). The TiVo Community site has always seemed to support the TiVo corporation and banned talk of video extraction or service theft. I suspect if this chatter becomes a problem, they'll make these topics off-limits as well.

It must be difficult for TiVo, on the one hand they need to keep pleasing the content companies and I wouldn't be surprised if eventually they end this kind of discussion or any block simple extraction tools that come out of it. But on the other hand you have to consider the same folks figuring out ways to get unencumbered video out of their devices are also their biggest fans and customers. Someone in a thread mentioned how their DVD burning TiVo won't be getting the update for a few months (there was a major bug revealed in beta testing that only applied to a certain configuration of TiVo) so they were going out to buy a new standalone TiVo, just to play with these new features. Signature lines at the TiVo Community often mention owning 2 or 3 TiVos. These aren't just customers, they're fanatics, and to close off their discussion would be unfortunate.

Compared to other major feature upgrades to TiVo, the amount of enthusiasm for TTG is high, and I suspect after another couple weeks of all these people poking and prodding their devices, we'll see some simple one-click ways to get video off your TiVo, convert to MPEG, and edit out commercials.

update: looks like someone produced a tool that does the conversion in five minutes.

January 20, 2005 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (38) | TrackBack

Poor First Impressions for TiVoToGo

Thomas Hawk has his own (poor) first impressions for TiVoToGo as well as a wrap-up of similar reviews from other bloggers. I think it's still a good feature, though it has a lot of drawbacks and concessions made to the industry to let it happen. However, it seems like the first wave of reviewers are unhappy with the featureset and experience.

I gotta agree about the 802.11b limitation criticism though. It's surprising that there aren't wireless g adapters supported yet, as currently I'm using a usb 2.0 wired ethernet adapter linked up to a d-link wireless g gaming adapter to get decent transfers out of my tivo box, on my wireless g network.

January 20, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack

TiVo 7.1 rollouts

My friend Jason just got the new TiVo 7.1 upgrade and posted images. Funny thing is that all images tagged with "tivo" at Flickr show someone else got their upgrade recently as well. Perhaps TiVo is rolling them out in earnest now? If you have a series 2 tivo and haven't gotten it yet, you might want to force the daily call, that's how Jason got his update.

January 19, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (14)

TiVo walked away from Comcast‽

This writeup from Engadget sums up my feelings about a story in the New York Times:

Ok, now we understand why TiVo CEO Michael Ramsay was promoted out of his job last week. You know how people have been telling TiVo how the only way they’re going to survive would be to convince some a cable company to license their digital video recorder software for use on set-top boxes? Yeah, well according to the New York Times last summer they were about to score a big deal with Comcast to do precisely this, that is until Ramsay pulled the plug at the last moment because he was convinced TiVo wasn’t getting paid enough money or given enough control over the service.

Remember how DirecTV accounts for 2,000,000 of TiVo's 3,000,000 customers and TiVo lost that relationship?  TiVo was negotiating with Comcast last summer and offered less than the $1/month that they get from DirecTV, so Michael Ramsay decided to walk away.

Now it's easy to play Monday morning quarterback in situations like this, but hasn't a big cable company deal been the dream all along? And in spite of sub-dollar monthly fees, couldn't the Tahiti strategy be an alternate revenue source for those customers?

To be fair, if the Comcast deal had been inked and then TiVo was prevented from introducing innovative products because of their threat to the cable companies we'd all be screaming bloody murder.  It's possible (note that word, this is pure speculation) that there was a non-negotiable clause that said something like "Non-Comcast video will not be available on the TiVo" which would have nixed any of the future plans like partnering with content providers.

When the story of TiVo is written, this Comcast negotiation could be the point when the company's outcome was decided.

January 17, 2005 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (27) | TrackBack

LaCie silverscreen announced

If your USB thumbdrive is going to be your MP3 player, why not make your USB 2.0 hard drive your media center?  That's the question LaCie is asking with their newly announced silverscreen. 

It's got all the features that you would expect in an external hard drive — storing and retrieving information — but on the back you'll find a big port which we assume connects to a break-out box of some sort. The datasheet (PDF) lists composite, S-Video and component out video; "dual stereo analog audio" (is that redundant or are there two stereo-outs?), coaxial SPDIF and optical SPDIF audio; and an IR receiver for the included remote. You can push the usual suspects through those ports: MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 (yes, that means DivX) video of various flavors; MP3, WMA and AAC audio; and JPEGs up to 8 megapixels to remind you of how inadequate your digital camera is.

While it gets its power from USB, they do list a power adapter on the datasheet so you won't have to drag your computer over to the TV to use it.  Hopefully the next version will use Firewire and allow you to hook it directly up to an HDTV without the need for all those cables.  Pricing is $250 for the 40 GB or $330 for the 80 GB and is expected to ship in mid-February.

January 14, 2005 in Products | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack

TiVo Ditching their CEO

TiVo Announced today that CEO Mike Ramsay is out and Thomas Hawk explains why it is long overdue. I've watched TiVo's few triumphs and many foibles over the years here and they're definitely in a rocky spot right now. They've made a lot of mistakes, but at this point the market is even tougher and they're going to need to do something amazing to pull themselves up. Calling in a new captain at this point could be a last ditch effort to turn the ship around. TV Harmony sums up their challenges against Microsoft and suggests someone like Mark Cuban take the helm. I certainly hope they go for a technologist for the new CEO, and they take some risks to regain their market.

January 12, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Mac mini - a killer Home Theater PC in the making?

My first thought after seeing the Mac mini debut today from Apple was that if you combined it with the extractable/hackable Comcast Motorola HD DVR or an EyeTV setup, you'd have a tiny, quiet, powerful little box you could slip into any home theater system for only $499, and run all your movies, music, and photos from it.

OS X is infinitely scriptable and hackable as well, so this new tiny quiet box just might be able to start something for HTPC enthusiasts.

January 11, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (100)

Extracting HD video from a Motorola 6412 and playing it on a mac

Thanks to a helpful comment in the Motorola DVR rolling out to Comcast thread, there's a great step-by-step guide to connecting a mac to the Motorola box via Firewire, extracting the video, playing it back, and even using iCal to schedule recordings. It's basically a complete home theater system for recording, saving, and editing video on a Mac. Another handy guide covers the software and hardware requirements of HDTV, from a mac perspective.

If you've got the new Comcast box and an old G4 laying around, this solution just might be perfect for you.

update: here are some instructions for doing the same process on a PC

January 10, 2005 in Hacks | Permalink | Comments (23)

All the other crazy shit I saw at CES

CES was huge this year, probably due to COMDEX cancelling last fall, pushing more computer hardware and software into the show. What was once an event for small time electronics suppliers to show their wares has grown into a whole building devoted to TVs and home theaters, a similarly huge section devoted to car audio and car computers, tons of computer hardware and software, cellphone stuff, and the ever ubiquitous rash of companies selling small electronic handhelds.

I only had about 24 hours in Las Vegas so I only got to spend half a day rushing through the giant convention center compound. I was amazed by what I saw in that half the things I saw looked like the near future, while the other half looked like crazy inventions no one would ever use. What follows is a bunch of photos of interesting stuff worth mentioning.

TV stuff

A glorious tower of plasma

There was an amazing display showing reactive ambient light technology in plasmas. It was in a tower about room sized, but going up all the way to the ceiling with a couple dozen plasmas. They were playing HDTV loops of saturated colored landscapes and the entire room would change color every few seconds, from all the backlights. It looked incredible (here's what a red-orange scene looked like).

Battle of the mondo plasmas

This claimed to be the biggest HD plasma available for sale on earth, which I think was around 80 inches. It was incredible to look at and I swear when I first got home my new low-end EDTV plasma looked blurry. It's funny, I sweated over getting a new TV for over two years, but the vibe at CES was that manufacturers expect everyone to be on HD plasma screen soon. It was a foregone conclusion, and companies are rushing products for this emerging market. Of course now that I have a decent TV, it feels like TV itself is slow to change. I don't expect to be getting OTA HDTV broadcasts anytime soon.

HDTV over everything!

There were a million and one weird little HDTV things like this HDTV over electricity booth (whose demo would cut out every so often).

An incredible looking handheld from Apex

There seemed to be zillions of small handheld personal video players from all kinds of Asian companies I've never heard of, but the Apex handheld with the huge 7" screen stood out from all the rest for the screensize. It's about the form factor of a big iPod, but every bit of the box front is screen. Most other players featured 3-4" inch screens, so the Apex looked amazing.

Car Stuff

Mr. Subtle

The show area for car-related products was massive and around every corner was some giant crazy ass demo vehicle like this one. It was raised several feet off the ground, featured LCD TVs in the bumpers, doors, headrests, headliner, visors, and truck bed. It was probably a $250k rig, advertising some product or shop's work.

Scion mania at CES

Easily the most popular audio demo car was the Scion xB by Toyota. It makes perfect sense since it's huge inside and can fit tons of gear, and the original car price starts low so you can buy one, gut it out, and fill it with demo gear for a lot cheaper than a Hummer or SUV demo. There were easily 20 or 30 Scions like this one, loaded with speakers and monitors, playing movies and music videos at full volume.

Ye Olde School

I include this shot for no other reason than it was unique among all the new stuff. A classic Dodge A100 pickup loaded with stereo gear, this beast had a crowd around it every time I walked past it.

XM put to good use: traffic aware mapping

XM was showing off a new Pioneer powered navigation system that interacted with the XM satellite network to receive traffic reports and show those on the map. I suspect this is a killer app for Southern California and the Bay Area, since there are often two or three ways you can get from point A to point B, and it's good to know what the real-time traffic conditions are. The downside is that I suspect after spending $2k on the basic navigation system, adding XM into that will likely cost more.

Computer, Music, and Gaming stuff

That little yellow box held 1.6 Terabytes of data

There were loads of small computer hardware booths, mostly centering around small office networking. I must have seen a dozen companies showing off a magic box you plug into a network, and it would claim to handle all sorts of network file services and/or internet services. These yellow boxes caught my eye for being about the size of a shuttle PC case, but holding a metric assload of data (up to 1.6 Tb).

The wheels of steel

There wasn't a lot of music gear in the spaces I wandered but these digital music turntables were kickass. A rep was playing wav or mp3 files and when he grabbed the fake turntable, he could lay down some nice scratches in real time. It sounded just like wax on a real turntable.

Push! No, pull! Again!

There was a lot of gaming hardware that could be described as "huge weird thing that is supposed to make you exercise while gaming." Chalk it up to DDR taking the world by storm, but there were lots of booths showing stationary bikes, treadmills, and these weird standing interfaces to console games. Personally, I'm really intrigued by the idea of games helping folks exercise but all the demos I saw were cumbersome and strange.

Other weird stuff

Put a sock in it!

Golla looked like a weird European company selling stuff like those newish iPod socks, but for any handheld device. I didn't think this was a niche worth exploiting, but I swear this massive display had dozens of colors and sizes for folks that wanted an unconventional case to slip their device into. I suppose someone is buying these things, judging by the floor space they took up.

1.21 gigawatts? Great Scott!

Some audio company knew that having a Delorean with a working Flux Capacitor loaded with audio gear would get any kid from the 1980s to stop and take a look.

Gizmondo?

I'm curious if this company was around before the Gizmodo blog, or if they copped the name and logo font from it.

Conclusions

Overall, the show was totally overstimulating and I could have spent another couple days going through it all. It was the highlight of my trip, though just about everything else about being in Vegas sucked. Having thousands and thousands of people show up for CES overwhelmed the airports, the surface streets, and the hotels. I had to hole up in a dingy, smoky, crappy place for almost $400 per night, since there was nothing else available, and getting anywhere in the city in a cab was difficult. I'm not sure if I'll go next year (maybe with some advanced planning it won't cost as much or suck as bad) but I finally understand what all the excitement is about CES.

January 9, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack

CES report: Sling Media's slingbox personal broadcaster

Sling Media is a new recently funded startup out of Silicon Valley and they debuted their Slingbox Personal Recorder at CES to much praise (as I was checking it out, someone from TechTV was dropping off a finalist award for most innovative product). If Mike Pusateri hadn't told me it was a killer product I had to check out, I would have missed it entirely. Amazingly enough, I found it purely by chance minutes after I first arrived (it would take me three more hours to even find TiVo).

Slingbox's booth at CES

What the box does is pretty simple -- it streams video wherever you are, but what is novel is how simple and well it works. In the past, people have setup rogue websites streaming TV and they've always been quickly shut down. What the Slingbox does is mimic that in a way, but lets you broadcast your own TV to your own computer, no matter where you are on earth, and should steer clear of any copyright problems since it is personal use only. What TiVo does is timeshift content to when you want to see it, and what Sling Media calls this is "placeshifting," letting you see it where you want.

The slingbox itself is weirdly shaped black thing that looks vaguely like a giant chocolate bar and it's got a set of AV inputs and outputs along with an ethernet connection. Once it's on your network, you can watch full screen streaming TV on any computer in your local network. It used a proprietary video viewer that looked like a skinned version of windows media player. The other major feature is that if you take your laptop with you to work or a cafe, you can also watch TV there as well.

The Slingbox client playing on a laptop, with a Slingbox sitting next to it

According to the Sling Media rep I talked to, even with the typical low upstream bandwidth of a home broadband connection you can still get some pretty good video outside of your home network. When you connect with the client, the app figures out how much bandwidth is available and the slingbox transcodes the video on the fly at the bitrate the network can sustain. The rep said it can work behind NAT routers, figuring out what ports are available and using those as needed for outside connections. The rep also stated that can control your home theater via its own IR blaster, and that you can completely control a TiVo remotely with the device, letting you select shows and play them back remotely.

The box is $249 and should be shipping this summer, without any setup fees or subscriptions. It sounds like a great simple piece of single-purpose hardware, and if I didn't already have a streaming TV hack setup at home I'd seriously consider one. It sounds like the perfect way to catch the previous night's Daily Show when you're eating lunch at your desk at work, or a great way to make sure your TiVo is going to catch a recording you set while traveling.

January 9, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Microsoft at CES

There wasn't a ton of news coming from Microsoft this week at CES (at least, related to PVR stuff). For the most part, they were there to court the zillions of small electronics manufacturers into using their OS, DRM, or both. Microsoft seemed to cover half of an entire building, with different sections devoted to showing off specific technologies. Front and center from the entrance, they were pushing their Spot watches and giving a bunch away throughout the center if you wore a MS sticker on your shirt. I ran into more than one person trying on their free new Spot watch in other sections of CES but I couldn't stop thinking "gee, what a nice thing MS did, giving away a watch that costs $10 per month to keep."

Comcast cable box running a MS-powered UI that looked almost like Windows Media Center XP's

Aside from Spot watches, they pimped their set-top box offerings and most interesting to me was their demo of the Comcast DVR UI (sorry for the crappy cellphone pic). It was a great looking UI, especially considering the typical interface cable company DVRs have. That's something TiVo and MS should go after -- figure out a way to decouple the UI and sell/license it as a product on top of cheap hardware. At least it'd mean folks would have easier to use devices.

Windows Media Center extender and xbox extender in the box below

They devoted another section to Windows Media Center and all the parts, including extenders and xbox extenders, and showed of HDTV playback and HDTV in windows media player, which looked great.

Microsoft's Digital Restrictions Management: you will be assimilated

There was a massive temple of DRM under a Playsforsure banner. They featured every handheld device that was MS DRM certified, which included probably fifty different types of tiny mp3 and video players. MS is really doing all they can to get protected-file playback on devices.

Creative's portable media center player

On the outskirts of the massive Microsoft area were booths featuring companies and products that had some sort of licensing deal with MS. My favorite one to play with was the Creative booth, where they let me play with one of their new portable media center players. They claimed the 20Gb drive could hold 80 hours of video and go 8 hrs on a charge, though the screen was pretty small. Probably a fun thing to have on the subway, if you had an hour to kill each day.

January 9, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Reporting from CES: Going Deeper into TiVo's announcements

I was traveling on business this week and decided to make a quick side trip to Vegas to see all the new products unveiled at CES (I wanted to go mostly to see the TiVo stuff in person). 2004 has been a rocky year for TiVo -- they didn't launch a lot of new features in the product line and had to grapple with competitors crowding the space. I was starting to feel their future was uncertain and hoped they'd have a lot to show at CES.

After hitting their booth/press area and talking to a few TiVo reps (including meeting the guy behind TiVo.com -- Hi Todd!), I have to say I was really impressed with all the new ventures and directions they are moving towards.

For the past couple weeks, I've been brainstorming a big list of ideas to turn TiVo around which I hoped to publish before CES, but I'm happy to say that almost all the big ideas I could think of were hit on by this week's set of announcements. I'll go through each new piece of TiVo tech I played with and mention all the answers I got to my questions, and what it means for TiVo customers.

TiVo ToGo (TTG)

I got to play with a couple TiVos running the new OS (it was version 7.1 I believe) that includes TiVo ToGo and a demo PC they had running the new TiVo Desktop. The entire package works like this:

• You'll need the new TiVo Desktop client to interact with TTG, which is already available for download at tivo.com/desktop (it won't work fully until you get the new OS update on your TiVo though)
• On the DRM front: Once you've got the new TiVo OS (I heard estimates that even for the folks on the priority list, it could be a couple weeks more before you get it) you'll get a Media Access Key on your TiVo that you put into your TiVo desktop to interact. You can reuse this key on up to ten devices, all accessing your TiVo. You'll also have to set a password for TTG/playing your shows.

Closeup of the TiVo Desktop, with a Now Showing list read from a networked TiVo

• You basically get a copy of your Now Showing list on your PC when launching the TiVo desktop, and you have to copy the shows entirely to your PC over the network before playback (no streaming while downloading)

Full sized TiVo Desktop (click for big version)

• Shows look to be in TiVo's proprietary mpeg2 format, at around ~1Gb/hour, so moving shows around on most home networks will be somewhat slow (tough to give a good estimate but expect that a typical 30 minute show might take 20 minutes to transfer from TiVo to your PC).

WMP 10 will ask for a password every time you hit play

• Once downloaded, you can play the shows in Windows Media Player (WMP) 10 after entering your password. You'll have to type the password every time you hit play, so I suspect it'll get old real quick. You can burn shows to DVD (sans DRM) using a Sonic MyDVD burning software package. They're working on having free demo versions of the dvd burning app available soon and I believe you'll have to buy the full version to use it beyond a trial period.

Prototype Media Player Portables for TiVo (click for big version)

• You can send shows to new Portable Media Center devices like the Creative units, since they interact with WMP 10. This is good news, since you won't necessarily have to have Windows Media Center also running to work with those new devices. TiVo also showed off prototypes of two personal video handhelds that could connect directly to your TiVo, so transfers could be over USB 2.0 instead of TCP/IP, which would be much faster. It's not much of a stretch to think you'd have a simple dock near your tivo that you could drop it on each day and pull new shows from.

HME (Home Media Engine if I remember correctly)

HME is an umbrella term for opening up various parts of TiVo to developers with a set of new APIs and software. I've long wondered why TiVo didn't poach ideas for features from the official and unofficial TiVo hacking communities and I've also wondered why they never embraced them to help let developers extend TiVo.

Prototype TiVo interface with new developer apps running (click for big version)

Basically with HME, TiVo's rolling out the red carpet for developers.

Here are my notes from talking to a couple reps:

• As stated previously, this set of stuff includes a format to write apps for the HMO, including preparing video, music, and images for a TiVo. There is also a gaming platform that will let you play java games over the local network, from code running on your PC.
• HME will be available to everyone using OS 7.1, enabled with a backdoor code that will be published on a developer site along with links to sourceforge downloads of demo games and apps in several weeks. I suspect it might leak out before that, if anyone at TiVo lets it slip.
• Developers rejoice: there will be a windows sandbox app that'll let you emulate TiVo on your desktop, so you can test code against it without having to actually try it out on your TiVo (which probably isn't located where you code).

Demo game running on a TiVo, done in java that runs on a networked PC

• If you write code for games or apps in java designed to be run from a PC, you'll be able to run it freely without any agreement from TiVo. You'll be able to offer your code for download from your website and anyone running their new tivo with the backdoor code should also be able to run your code from their network as you did. Sometime this summer,  TiVo will highlight the best apps and run those from central TiVo servers instead of local PCs.

It sounded like the Video/Music/Photos stuff is mostly aimed at large content companies or people selling content through TiVo. So it's not like you'll be able to watch your own video of your child's first steps anytime soon, because TiVo reps lead me to believe only TiVo approved media apps would be deployable to TiVos, mostly for copyright concerns (without this, I guess someone could create a rogue porn video marketplace with stuff they found on the net, but didn't have rights to). That's a lot like how Danger controls the code on their hiptops -- only approved code can be deployed to other users.

The Standalone HD TiVo

Dual tuner CableCARD HD TiVo, rotating in a case

So the one big obvious thing on the cablecard TiVo accounced this week that seemed to get lost in the cracks was that it is indeed a dual-tuner HD recorder. It has two card slots instead of one, and I got to see one playing some generic HD content on a HD plasma. It looked terrific, though I'm still worried about their estimated ship date of first quarter 2006. I think Comcast will be able to get a lot of the Motorola boxes out to meet demand by then (a fellow TiVo fan that was grilling reps along side me admitted he had a new dual HD motorola PVR that he loved and couldn't wait until 2006 for this). I would have liked to see this device coming out this summer, while the demand is still great.

I'll be posting a few more bits today about Microsoft, my favorite product of the show Sling Media, and various random bits and photos from the show floor.

January 8, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBack

TiVo announces new developer tools

The TiVo news just won't stop, and frankly I'm starting to get a little giddy.  The latest bit of information to come out is that TiVo is going to be opening up more to developers.  The three new tools are TiVo Video Publisher, TiVo Multimedia Web Services API and TiVo Service Integration.

TiVo Video Publisher will allow video  creators to provide downloadable content for TiVo.  They talk about how content providers will be able to package and protect their video, but I hope that the amateurs won't be left out of the party.  It would be great to be able to pull up my mom's vacation video as easily as a movie from the big studios.  If they play their cards right they could make a killing off of long tail videos.

TiVo Multimedia Web Services API is a way for web publishers to put their content on the TiVo, the most exciting for me being support for RSS.  Podcasting and videoblogging are starting to get some attention, the TiVo could become the platform of choice for personal media publishing.

TiVo Service Integration is a way for 3rd parties to provide and charge for content on the TiVo.  TiVo users would be able to "purchase/subscribe to" content using their remotes, TiVo would handle billing and customer support.  This opens up a huge market for 3rd party developers to use the TiVo as a platform.

TiVo previously opened up their Home Media Option to allow 3rd party developers to publish media to the TiVo over the LAN.  The most successful project for the Home Media Option is JavaHMO, which many users prefer to the official TiVo Desktop.

January 7, 2005 in News, TiVo | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

TiVo announces standalone HD TiVo

More good TiVo news from CES: They announced a CableCARD standalone HD TiVo by beginning of next year. Hopefully that isn't too late.

January 6, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (22) | TrackBack

Microsoft and TiVo sitting in a tree

Matt's going to the CES on Friday and will no doubt have lots of good stuff, but TiVo news is already trickling out.  During his keynote, Bill Gates announced a partnership between Microsoft and TiVo.  No, they aren't going to stop competing in the PVR market, but they are making sure that TiVoToGo will work on Portable Media Center devices.  Does that mean I can use the Media Center Extender for XBox to play shows from my TiVo?  I'm not holding my breath.

January 6, 2005 in News, TiVo, Windows Media Center XP | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

EFF's Review of Elgato's EyeTV 500

The EFF (who is doing a bang up job fighting the FCC's Broadcast Flag ruling that is set to come down this July) is starting to review all the HDTV recording software they can find. One of the problems with the broadcast flag is that your ability to record, store, and  edit HDTV streams on your computer will be greatly restrained if not made illegal outright come this July.

Today they posted a review of Elgato's EyeTV 500, a HDTV solution for the mac. The downsides are that you need a really fast mac to record and display recordings (they have a 500Mb, 5 minute demo file you can try your system out on), but they did show you can tape a movie off over-the-air HDTV and edit it freely (something outlawed in six month's time). The upsides are the EyeTV 500's simple install and operation that seems very mac-like.

The EFF's also working on install guides and packages for getting HDTV recording in MythTV, which I can't wait to see.

January 5, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

CES week

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) runs this week in Las Vegas, and this year it's bigger than ever thanks to the shuttering of last fall's COMDEX show. While I can't seem to find anyone on the floor in Vegas doing any real-time reporting, Engadget and Gizmodo are good places to watch the flurry of new gadget announcements this week from Las Vegas. If you know of any others covering the event, please post them in the comments.

I'll be showing up there on Friday and will do my best to run around taking photos and info on all the new PVR-related products I can find, and hopefully posting them later that day.

January 4, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack

All my TiVo's output, for the world to see

As an update to an earlier post here, I present: everything on my TiVo. I've also put a link to it in the sidebar, along with the currently playing show.

It's a new drive, so I haven't quite caught up to redoing all my old season passes. Also it's being stored and served from another server of mine, so I've had to use iframes to pull it in, but it was a fun couple of hours of tinkering that got it all running.

January 3, 2005 in Hacks | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack

Videora - BitTorrent RSS Reader

Videora, a BitTorrent/RSS Reader that will basically help you locate, find, and keep up with downloaded TV shows and movies, has just launched. Here are some screenshots, which look really slick and easy to use. It even has wishlist and season pass functionality so it's not too far off to think this could replace a TiVo and network/cable TV in a few years.

Om has a good review of it that mentions a key point: all the cool cutting edge stuff that is anything near quasi-legal seems to be coming out of Canada, not the US, due to the copyright cartel's constant lawsuits.

January 3, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (10)

RSS feeds of your Now Playing and ToDo lists

Years ago, fellow weblogger Matt Kingston was one of the first people I ever saw that hacked his TiVo to do all sorts of amazing stuff like output his now showing list to his website (his hacking also inspired me to dip into my TiVo's case). Another TiVo Hacker and weblogger named Dave Wild came along and wanted to do the same thing for his site, so he hacked together some RSS output feeds for TiVos running TiVoWebPlus. The files are on Dave's site and here's a TiVo forum post about the details.

Last night I downloaded these hacks and loaded them onto my TiVo, but I haven't gotten it to work quite yet though I'm optimistic I'll have it running in a few days, after which, I'll start publishing my Now Showing and ToDo status here.

update: actually, the relevant code is in the TiVo Forum post, which I did get to work, no problem.

January 3, 2005 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Another set of first impressions of the (Comcast) Motorola dual tuner HD DVR

I'm hearing a lot of good things about the Motorola dual tuner HD DVR that Comcast is rolling out across the country. Here are designer James Duncan Davidson's first impressions of the unit and he posted a screenshot of the unit in action.

January 3, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (60) | TrackBack

TiVoToGo Launched

TiVoToGo is live!  The feature — which was announced a year ago nearly to the day — will allow people to copy shows from their TiVo box to their Windows PCs.  If you're anxious to get started follow the instructions on TiVo's site to make sure your TiVo box is updated, add a network adapter if you haven't already and download the latest version of TiVo Desktop.

For more information, be sure to check out this post from TiVoBill on the forums.  There are a bunch of caveats that go along with TiVoToGo like it not working with non-Windows computers (they're working on Mac support), DVD burning TiVos or DirecTiVos.  Then there's this DRM doozie:

Note: Not all shows may be eligible for transfer from your TiVo box to your computer. Programming providers may restrict or limit the ability to record, display, view or transfer any particular program using a variety of copy protection mechanisms.

See our post about "transitional fair use" for more about what that could mean in the future.

We'll be sure to post our impressions of the feature once we get a chance to actually use it.

Update: As pointed out in the comments, it might take weeks before the software is loaded on your TiVo box, but you can try to skip the line by signing up for a priority upgrade.

January 3, 2005 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (28) | TrackBack