Give your TiVo a Facelift

This is an odd development but may be useful for some folks. The guys behind Weaknees figured out that you can interchange the front faceplates of TiVo boxes between almost any series 2 TiVo or DirecTiVo.

One of the downsides of having a standalone TiVo is that if you lose the remote or the batteries die, it's essentially a useless box. But the DirecTV versions always included basic TiVo nav buttons on the face. I've had a couple DirecTiVos for the past few years and from time to time if I'm sitting in front of my home theater setup fiddling with buttons, I tend to use the faceplate controls instead of a remote, but it's not very often that I do it.

Still, for die-hard TiVo fans a new button-filled faceplate might serve as a good backup in case your standalone TiVo remote ever dies.

Television Reloaded

Steven Levy of Newsweek does an article on the future of television, covering new hardware, time-shifting, video-on-demand, IPTV (TV on the Internets :), and other trends in television viewing.

However, the part of the article that rang most true to me was this:

The result may be that when all the time-shifting and space-shifting is accounted for, most people will watch the same stuff by the same creators. In fact, even with today's relative abundance, most people stick to only a few channels.

According to Nielsen Media Research, households that receive about 60 channels usually watch only 15. Households whose systems can receive 96 channels (around the national average) actually watch... 15.

What's more, a recent study conducted at the UPenn Annenberg School for Communications showed that when people were offered more programming choices, they stuck to fewer selections—and, alarmingly, watched fewer news shows.

MSNBC - Television Reloaded

Broadcast Machine lets you publish your video online easily

In the midst of a Internet TV movement, I'm happy to report the Participatory Culture group has released their first beta of Broadcast Machine. Broadcast Machine is an integrated upload, download, bittorrent, and gallery web application that is simple to install and run, letting you upload your own video shows and share them with anyone online. The folks behind BM are also working on a desktop video player, dubbed DTV, which I'm guessing will be an auto downloader/cataloger that works like podcasting does (only for video in this case).

I setup a test site on my own server, using Creative Commons video as a source, and it took all of ten minutes to deploy the php package and add an item. The app looks great for a first beta and I didn't have any problems with the process. If you've been video blogging, have a broadband connection, and are looking for ways to distribute video yourself, check out Broadcast Machine. It's a great little package.

Mark Pesce on hyperdistribution

Mark Pesce has a two-part series on Mindjack concerning piracy of television content, the impact of p2p networks, the growth of broadband Internet access, and a proposal for a new way to create revenue streams from hyperdistribution.

The pervasive culture of TV downloading leaves the producers of pre-produced television programs high and dry, receiving nothing of value for their work. But is this really true? The absolute, basic motivation of a TV producer is not money — though money is needed for production — but to gain and hold an audience's attention. TV producers want their programming to be watched as widely as possible — by everyone. That's what they care about, and that's all they care about, because, with viewers, everything else takes care of itself: audiences equal money.

Guide data subscriptions for MythTV

Up until now, the preferred method of getting guide data for MythTV has been using free data from Zap2It DataDirect. The problem with free is that you have to fill out surveys every so often, and it doesn't have some of the higher-end features that other guide data services offer. Enter LxM Suite, which is selling subscription data to MythTV users for an initial cost of $30 for 6 months.

The upshot is that they offer better guide data, recommendations and new themes. They're also channeling some of the subscription money back into the MythTV community by funding the developers. Subscribers can even vote on features that they want and LxM will offer bounties based on what's popular. Take a look at their services page for more about what they're doing. This seems like a textbook example of creating a business around open source software, it will be interesting to see what comes out of their 6 month pilot.

How would you change TiVo?

People spent the weekend answering the question "How would you change TiVo?" over on Engadget. Even TiVo loyalists will admit that there are imperfections with their PVR of choice. While the perennial favorites "Get rid of TiVoToGo DRM" (which is the root of the "Support x non-Windows platform" suggestions), "built in networking hardware," "dual tuners," "expandable storage" and "sell out to Apple" were all well represented, here are a few of the more interesting ones:

• The Jeremy : Viewer voting options. Actually voting on the quality of the show you just watched, and the ability to give feedback to "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down" actual networks. I detest UPN and G4, so I'd like to actually have my TiVo upload my vote to TiVo to share with interested advertisers.
  Offer an option to get "free" service by agreeing to watch a certain amount of downloaded commercials tailored to your aggregate viewing habits.
• Haggis!: Exclusions in the wish lists so you could automatically record anything about say, Scotland, but not anything about golf that was played in Scotland.
• telstar: Ability to order the soundtrack to movies that are playing, and have it synced to my iPod
• Jen: The ability to download commercials via product line, category or client specific.
• Jim: Wishlist to select 4 star movies
• Grafix: detection on all channels of when a certain word is use to record that segment. such as program to seach "PSP" then using scientific mathematics to detect a similar sound our picture in a broadcast then recording the program [ed. I think what the commenter wants is some sort of closed captioning search]
• C9: Record by Folksonomy, make it social, allow for greater skinning.

There are also a lot of complaints in the comments, hopefully TiVo is listening to all this free market research.

Ramsay on the Long Tail

You know it's time to move the Long Tail from the wired column to the tired column when USA Today starts talking about it. The paper assembled an all-star panel including TiVo chairman Michael Ramsay, Firefox developer Blake Ross and Chuck D to talk about what's ahead for the internet and digital entertainment.

Q: What does the "long tail" mean for entertainment and media?

Ramsay: ... We can measure it. There's maybe only a hundred people who watch bass fishing or speed knitting or whatever. So they watch it, and it's important to them.

What we've found is that the viewing patterns of people who watch live television — and are therefore restricted to prime time whenever they're home — are dramatically different than the viewing patterns of people who have the choice of just picking whatever they want.

Given the choice, people will migrate towards a much greater variety, and the deal is you've got to make everything available to everybody so that they're not restricted. And if you do, the market for that more esoteric, more specialized stuff is just as big as the market of the mainstream stuff.

There's plenty more good stuff in the article, including Michael Ramsay talking about "storage anxiety" when people have too many things saved on their TiVo that they're never going to get around to watching.

Have a baby, get a TiVo

TiVo is giving away gifts in Dallas this Mother's Day:

Women who give birth at Parkland Memorial Hospital over Mother's Day weekend will each get a free TiVo digital video recorder – even if they don't know what it is. Company representatives were at the hospital Friday morning chatting up new moms and handing out certificates for the recorders along with free lifetime TiVo service, both valued at $498. While the women seemed grateful, several patients admitted later that they weren't sure at first what the devices were used for.

Link to Dallas Morning News article (complete with registration wall)

Broadcast Flag shot down!

Great news from the legal front: a court has ruled that the FCC overstepped its bounds in requiring all new HDTV hardware to have broadcast flag features after July 1, 2005 and promptly struck it down in a unanimous decision. Here's a background piece from last year outlining all the problems I saw with the law.

This is especially good news to those building their own home theater PCs that are HD-capable and even better news for manufacturers that won't have to have every device vetted by a secret panel before it can go to market.

I was just about to announce that the EFF is throwing another build-in, where they have an open invitation for those wanting to build HD-recording, linux based PVR machines which would be illegal after July 1 of this year. Now that they've won this battle, it doesn't have the same urgency (less than two months was left before the lock-down), but the event in San Francisco is still going off on Saturday, May 21st, as both a celebration and a hacking fest. Details follow:

TiVo Now Playing dashboard widget for OS X Tiger

The new version of OS X from Apple includes Dashboard, a sort of API using simple web scripting to build widgets you can manipulate on your desktop. There are hundreds of them available already to do all sorts of things, but one noteworthy new dashboard widget is the TiVo Now Playing widget.

It works with standalone TiVos with the 7.1 OS and TiVo Desktop, showing you what's available on your TiVo in real-time. It also looks pretty cool.