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Moviebeam pulled from test markets, going dark

After being announced about a year and a half ago (I got to chat with their PR folks soon after launch), it looks like Disney is taking MovieBeam offline, perhaps for good:

The company plans to close its experimental video-on-demand service this week in all three of its test cities. Disney spokeswoman Michelle Bergman said the shutdown was necessary to upgrade systems as the company seeks potential partners to explore MovieBeam's "next phase."

It is uncertain, however, when — or even if — the service will be relaunched.

I can't say I'm surprised to hear the news, the fees seemed way too high from the outset. It was $7 a month for the box, and $2.50-$4 for each movie you watched. You only got to view them in a 24 hour window before they deleted themselves and your selections were limited to a 100 or so movies. In the age of $3 DVD rentals at any corner store and Netflix to your door for $12-$20 a month, I don't think MovieBeam had a chance.

It was cool to see a company try wireless delivery of media, but they priced it higher than DVD, and it was compressed movie quality below that of a DVD. In the end, it's all about saving a few bucks for customers, and MovieBeam didn't offer that. It's surprising really, to think it was launched directly from a studio, no middle man at all, and didn't require anything beyond a settop box antenna to receive shows, but they priced it above simple DVD rentals.

Oh well, lots of lessons to learn here for others looking at the space. [thanks Mike]

April 27, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (22)

MakeZine.com: Free TiVo: Build a Better DVR out of an Old PC

The excellent Make Magazine (a great hacker how-to guide) has a good guide to building your own home theater PC: Build a Better DVR out of an Old PC.

The author uses an old PC and a copy of Beyond TV with a bunch of off-the-shelf parts and covers everything in this step-by-step guide that includes not only TV recording an playback, but music, video, and gaming capabilities.

April 27, 2005 in How-To | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBack

Open Media Network

The Open Media Network launched Tuesday with a broad plan to enable many things we've been talking about here recently, like downloadable television shows, movies, and podcasts. Marc Andressen (a Netscape founder) is on the board and when I first heard about this, I assumed it would be a lot like Our Media, opening up content, streaming, and hosting to anyone on earth.

Despite the "Open" name and .org in their URL, it appears that Open Media isn't quite like that, built on Kontiki, a DRM-friendly media distribution system that keeps you from doing anything with files once you've downloaded them (I recall the first time I saw Kontiki, their product boasted features that would automatically delete downloaded movies after playing them x number of times).

The site doesn't work for me in Firefox and won't let me download a demo movie (which even includes "DRM" in the filename). In Internet Explorer, I'm asked to install a custom activeX control from a company I'm already having trouble trusting. Oh, and it's windows only.

I don't know how widespread Open Media adoption will be, but so far the early launch doesn't look too promising. Still, it's good to see more players in the IPTV space launching.

April 27, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Free (after rebates) TiVo at Circuit City

UPDATE: Circuit City isn't listing any rebates for the 40 hour TiVo anymore. While there have been typos with online sales before, I doubt that's the case here because they had the message "Free after rebates and activation" on the Digital Video Recorders page. If you got in on the deal, enjoy your free TiVo (assuming those rebates come).

Circuit City is giving away free-after-rebate 40 hour TiVos. The $200 units have the normal $100 TiVo rebate and an additional $100 Circuit City rebate resulting in $FREE.

You're skeptical, I can appreciate that. You're looking at the Circuit City page and seeing that there's only one rebate listed. However, if you click the Rebate Details popup you'll see both rebates listed, and Circuit City's Digital Video Recorders page uses the phrase "Free after rebates and activation," so this looks like the real deal. The rebates end on April 23, 2005 and there's no telling when you'll actually get the rebate.

April 22, 2005 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (20) | TrackBack

Google Maps on TiVo

Google Maps was released a few months ago and quickly took the online world by storm due to the ingenious way you can drag around inside the maps.

Recently, they added satellite map views which don't really help you get where you want to go as much as look really cool when you zoom around your own neighborhood.

But cooler than all that is a HME hack that puts Google Maps on your TiVo, complete with dragging, zooming, and both satellite and normal map views, just like in a web browser. Also worth noting is that it was created by none other than the founder and CTO of Strangeberry (currently TiVo's lead engineer for TiVoToGo, HME, and other new TiVo technologies whoa! He just left TiVo).

April 21, 2005 in Hacks, News, TiVo | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBack

The Onion: TiVo Wishlist Roulette

The always amusing Onion's own AV club has an interesting new way to goof around with a TiVo: set a random keyword wishlist and automatically record to see what you capture in 24 hours, dubbed TiVo Wishlist Roulette.

They set it to "War" and let it go to town, and in the process it grabbed movies, documentaries, kids cartoons, and even music shows. Any generic term would grab random programs, but this might be the cure for the summer reruns when nothing interesting seems to be on. Just pick a word and run it for a few days to see what you get.

April 20, 2005 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

TiVo chatting up Yahoo!, Google

CNET is reporting that TiVo is courting the top two search engines, Google and Yahoo!. One possible use would be allowing people to schedule recordings for shows they find in the search engines.

Then there's the fact that both Yahoo! and Google offer video services now, which fit in with TiVo's Video Publisher. This would give TiVo access to a whole lotta Long Tail video. This would be especially powerful if TiVo opened up scheduling via web services. As this weekend's Ajax hacks showed, there's a lot of people who want their TiVo to do more. Speaking of the Long Tail—and who isn't using that buzzword these days?—the Long Tail blog shows how this could be done.

For the benefit of the deathwatch crowd, there's also talk of investment or even a buyout:

A second person familiar with the talks said TiVo has held talks with both Google and Yahoo about a potential equity investment, including the possibility of an outright acquisition. Any deal would likely be exclusive, this source said, Nothing has been finalized, however, and the talks could yet fall apart.

"A deal to cooperate could happen quickly, but then the details would have to be worked out," the first source said. "The search companies need to work with companies like TiVo because they have access to the living room, and they own a television interface."

April 18, 2005 in News, TiVo | Permalink | Comments (18) | TrackBack

TiVo gag on the Simpsons

In the interest of not freaking Simpsons nerds out, I've hidden what some might consider a spoiler from the April 17, 2005 episode below.

update (from Matt): now that it has played out on the west coast, here's a 3.5Mb video clip from the show, demonstrating the tivo sounds and tivo spoof OS of Professor Frink's astrology machine.

April 17, 2005 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack

PSP Home Control 1.0

liquidice recent wrote in describing a pretty crazy PSP hack, reportedly using it as a wireless controller for his entire entertainment system, including his TiVo. Without a PSP and his code, I can't verify that this is real and it's possible it may be a hoax, but I'll reproduce his post in full and let you decide, because it looks like a really cool hack:

I have not seen anyone else do something like this with the PSP, so I am posting it in hopes to inspire others to do something cool with their PSP. The closest thing I have seen is a controller page for XBMC, but it was just some text links, and did not impress me.

I've taken it a step further. I now have the ability to turn my lights on and off. Have full control (Play, Stop, Pause, Menu) of my DVD player, TIVO, and High Def TV, all wirelessly from my PSP. I did this in a few hours using Photoshop to make some graphics. I put an image map on the graphics and created some HTML pages which are hosted on my WACI NX server. The links are crafted so that when the PSP highlights and clicks on a spot on the image map, it instructs the WACI NX server to send an IR signal to my A/V equipment or triggers it's relays to cut power on the lights.

Apologies for the blurry pictures. The PSP is not very photogenic.

My next step is to add some temperature monitors, and more integration with my PC and some AV switching equipment to stream video signals around the house. Hopefully there's a way to embed a little video clip or live stream in the new browser.

I hope that Sony realizes the potential the PSP has. If firmware update on May 1st adds a browser that resides in flash that can be called from the 'start' menu, I will be able to quickly surf to my control page and start controlling things throughout my house. Currently, I just leave Wipeout in browser mode and put my PSP to sleep. Wipeout has so many menus and loading screens to get to the web browser.

Oh and before everyone goes around screaming that this is another hoax like the AIBO PSP controller. I can assure you this is real and it works, and I use it every day. I snagged the WACI NX web server left over from a home theater install job I did last month. It's great because it has an HTTP and FTP server and uses regular HTML to issue the commands making it the perfect match for my PSP, which does not support any fancy Javascripts or DHTML. For more info on the WACI NX you could check out waciworld.com

Also view the original post here:

http://psphacks.blogspot.com/2005/04/psp-home-control-10.html

April 16, 2005 in Hacks | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

TiVo + Ajax hacks

gregman wrote in with a couple choice hacks he's written, one is a better nowplaying list for your OS 7.1 equipped TiVo, and the other is a pretty cool visualization of the now playlist list as a Pie Chart.

The notable thing about the nowplaying list hack is that it uses ajax, a recent trend of scripting/data streaming tweaks in web applications.

April 16, 2005 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Tivo doing Damage Control for Mac Fans

TiVoPony, an employee from their product marketing group, drops in from time to time on the TiVo Community site to let folks know what the official word is.

Regarding the recent story that TiVo's CFO let slip mac support for TiVo ToGo could be years away, even I was surprised at the amount of backlash from mac users. There are dozens of people in yesterday's thread swearing off their TiVo as a result of it and saying they would no longer support the company that didn't support features for macs.

Today TiVoPony dropped in to state that that the reporters at the school might have misrepresented the story and they are indeed working on TTG support for the mac:

I've traded emails with Dave Courtney, and here's the scoop...

His comments were not represented accurately at all in that article. 

We value Mac enthusiasts who own TiVo DVR's. And as we've previously stated, we're working towards support that would bring TiVoToGo to the Macintosh platform.

We have not yet announced a timeline as to when that service may be available though.

No firm dates, but at least they're listening, which is a good sign.

April 15, 2005 in News, TiVo | Permalink | Comments (28) | TrackBack

The Clicker: CableCARD and OpenCable

Engadget has probably the best summary of CableCARD and OpenCable I've seen online, covering all the basic issues and pointing fingers as to where it has gone wrong. The FCC forced the cable companies to play fair and adopt an OpenCable/CableCARD system, but it turns out in practice that it's difficult to actually make approved products that can take advantage of the functionality because of a lengthy, time consuming review process. Since it's so important for companies to get their products first to market, and the competing interests of cable companies wanting to perpetually rent you their own box, it's likely to die as an actual useful feature before it's even gotten a chance to show up in many products.

When TiVo announced a standalone HD TiVo, complete with CableCARD support, I wondered why TiVo said it would take a year to get to market. Perhaps this is one reason.

April 14, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Cool Microsoft Media Center PC concept

One & Co is a design and engineering firm in San Francisco, the type that frequently get contracted out by big companies looking for fresh ideas.

Their "Microsoft Living Room PC" Concept looks so hot that I wouldn't even mind having a PC next to my TV or sofa if it looked like this.

(I don't know quite what's going on in the second image -- if that's a Bose-style speaker wall with a teeny-tiny screen on it, they should really add a bigger screen :)

Most people say that what is holding back the home theater PC from the mainstream is the ugliness, noise, and general unstable nature of PCs. If MS could find a manufacturer to sell Media Center PCs like this, I'm sure they'd have an easier time getting people to try them out.

April 14, 2005 in Windows Media Center XP | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

TiVo CFO: No TivoToGo for Mac OS X Due to Cost

At a talk at the University of Pennsylvania, TiVo CFO David Courtney admitted that it isn't in TiVo's plans to release a version of TiVoToGo that will work on the Mac:

"We haven't committed to any plans [for integration] to it because of the cost"

Ouch. When I heard that TiVo was going to use Microsoft's version of DRM on windows, I knew a mac client would be non-existent or very far off, but up until now TiVo officials have stated that mac support was always right around the corner, now they admit it could be years off, or not at all.

Seeing how the iTunes Music Store required a new version of both iTunes and Quicktime, I can't see how TiVo will be able to bring their DRM video to the mac platform for the foreseeable future. Either Microsoft needs to build a DRM-aware media player update for the mac, or quicktime has to embrace a new video DRM solution, both longshots.

The bummer is that of all the TiVo owners I know, at least half of them use macs, and now that TiVo has closed the DRM holes in their latest version, those mac owners can't legitimately play back shows on their own computers, in their own homes using the old method. A sad day for mac and tivo enthusiasts everywhere. [thanks Peter and Dave for the tip]

April 14, 2005 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (46) | TrackBack

Google Video (Beta) Upload Program launches

Long Tail of video? Meet Google: Google just launched their Video Upload Program.

It's crazy to think that searches on Google Video will now include random people's own video and hopefully you won't be limited by what you can search for and they highlight the good stuff. I suspect the main Google Video site will look less like google.com and more like Google News someday, as they showcase video of all types.

I just tried it out, uploading a few short movies I took on my digital camera. Here's what the uploader looks like when finished:

And here's what my uploaded videos currently look like, while sitting in limbo:

The coolest part is that you can even charge for downloads/viewings of video. I can't wait to see what comes out of this, perhaps Google was trying to one-up companies in the bittorrent and IP-based TV space before they could even get going.

April 13, 2005 in News | Permalink | Comments (32)

The Long Tail of TV and coming IP TV Revolution

I'm a big fan of WIRED editor Chris Anderson's Long Tail thesis and his blog about the subject. The gist of it is that while a handful of popular shows/songs/movies make up the bulk of revenue for entertainment companies, often 50% or more of their total revenue can come from many people finding the less popular stuff, or the long tail. Thanks to various technologies enabled by the internet, like Amazon, Netflix, iTunes Music Store, it's now easier than ever to find that one old movie, song, or show you really loved and buy it (Amazon, NetFlix and iTMS all contain inventories no physical store could ever match).

In a recent posting on his long tail blog, Anderson talked about how television is an industry headed towards a disaster/wake-up-call, and how TV serves the long tail the least of all entertainment industries. In a related interview, Thomas Hawk talked with Jeremy Allaire about his new venture Brightcove, which is also mentioned at the end of Anderson's piece.

Both pieces are illuminating. The TV industry as a whole produces over 31 million hours of programming each year, but most people only have access to 3-4% of the total, and finding what you like even among that smaller number is difficult. There's also the weird way most TV shows are shown once and then never seen again. Ad rates and audiences are dropping, threatening the entire business model that TV is built on, so it's only a matter of time before big change comes to the TV space.

If you could digitize and make available all 31 million hours of video produced each year, and had a sophisticated search mechanism, people could find all the niche programming they want and love. Some shows (like say, I don't know... "Hawaiian Snowmobile Video Magazine") might only have 1000 fans in the entire world, but if you could capture that audience and give them the shows they want to see, you might be able to make quite a bit of money selling the show at a premium while also selling advertising to a very specific audience. Some folks call this "narrowcasting" and those in the ad world are always looking for ways to reach their intended customers.

It's an exciting time for people that watch TV and those that are on the cusp of new trends in delivering television to viewers, but it's likely a bad time to be a network TV executive, straining to keep old business models alive. I can't wait to see where the world of TV is in five years. I suspect I'll be picking shows I want to see off a website, buying copies for a small charge, and downloading them for to my home theater by then.

April 12, 2005 in Op-Ed | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack

TiVo adds ads with DirecTV and Comcast

TiVo, the little box that lets you avoid seeing ads, it working hard to make sure you see ads. They have deals with Comcast and DirecTV to make sure you don't forget that a soft drink isn't about sugar, water and CO2 – it's a lifestyle choice that defines you as a person.

The popular, if not profitible, DirecTiVos will being showing those billboard ads and both TiVo and DirecTV will be sharing in the profits. While DirecTV has shied away from adding features like Home Media Option to the DirecTiVos (despite the political backing of an online petition, which is probably the first time in history one of those failed to work) subscribers will be happy to hear that DirecTV is upgrading their boxes with a feature to ram commercials down their ad holes. There must be an online petition for DirecTV to add more commercials from both people who requested that feature.

Not to be outdone, Comcast and TiVo announced that they would be replacing commercials broadcast in recorded shows with updated ads that are more "targeted and relevant." If online advertising is any indication of how targeted and relevant advertising can be, we can't wait to get 50,000 smileys for our TiVo. This also raises questions that the billboard ads raised, like can a relevant Pepsi ad replace a Coke ad? Or, for people living in Detroit and used to being targeted (just not by advertising), a Faygo ad?

None of this ad stuff should be too surprising (well, replacing old ads with new ones kind of is) because TiVo has been saying for a while that they want to make bundles of cash on advertising. It is kind of disheartening, but you can expect to see more advertising in your TiVo as they move their business plan towards earning more and more ad revenue.

April 7, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (26) | TrackBack

DirecTV's HD problem

A few months ago, I finally splurged and got a low-end plasma TV capable of displaying HDTV signals (it's only 480p or ED, but still). I longed for a HD DirecTiVo to replace my current (hacked) DirecTiVo box. Last month I called DirecTV to inquire what my options were, and that's when trouble started.

Basically, if I paid $999 for a HD DirecTiVo box plus ten bucks a month extra, I could get their HDTV pack including Discovery and ESPN in HD format, their HDNet offering of various programming, and HBO in HD, since I already get HBO. Local stations in HD format like Fox, ABC, CBS, and NBC were subject to pending FCC approval even though DirecTV has a pretty page set up to sell it.

I called today to see how that FCC ruling went and unfortunately, DirecTV lost. If you get local channels in standard definition format, you cannot get HD. DirecTV can only offer Over the Air (OTA) antennas, which doesn't help me being out in the hilly regions away from Portalnd, OR. They did say if I lived in LA or NYC, I could get local channels in HD from DirecTV, but otherwise the rest of the country was screwed. I don't think five channels of varying content are worth a thousand dollar box (with constant HDMI problems) plus ten bucks a month.

But it doesn't end there -- DirecTV sent up a couple new satellites last year to increase their bandwidth for more HD channels. They're talking about adding dozens-to-hundreds of channels in HD format in the next year, but (drumroll please...) it'll be in a new encryption/encoding (MPEG-4) format which won't work with $999 HD DirecTiVos.

The Washington Post recently mentioned this in an advice column, warning folks to avoid the HD DirecTiVo boxes. Word on the street is that DirecTV will offer their competing NDS DVR for recording HD signals instead of TiVo, with no concrete plans for converting current owners from one to the other. DirecTV says that plans are to have the new channels and DVRs out by the end of the year, so the bottom line is that if you're a HDTV owner with DirecTV in 2005 that wants to record HDTV, you're S.O.L.

It's a bummer really, since I've gotten DirecTV in 2002, I never thought I'd go back to cable, but Comcast now offers their HD DVR in my area for less than the price of my DirecTV package, and I wouldn't have to buy a $999 doorstop to get it. I'd really like to enjoy network shows in HD, and it looks like my only option for the next year.

DirecTV really dropped the ball on this one.

UPDATE: Thomas Hawk says there's a way to route around DirecTV's damage by getting the right rep on the phone and asking for the NY/LA service for a few bucks extra. Sounds like exactly what I wanted, though the reps I've spoken with say they're not allowed to sell that to me. Kind of expensive to get the HD locals for another $10/month on top of the $10/month regular HD package, but at least it's possible.

April 5, 2005 in DirecTV, Op-Ed | Permalink | Comments (70) | TrackBack