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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!

by Matt Haughey January 31, 2005 in News, TiVo

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