YouTube coming to TiVo
TiVo announced YouTube support coming to Series 3 and HD TiVos and Google themselves have a short case study on the project.
Sounds like it'll be a lot like the AppleTV feature which I personally like, but only occasionally use. It's great to be able to add something to a youtube playlist on your PC, then walk over to your TV to view it, especially for longer videos that play like TV shows, so I suspect this feature will get quite a bit of uptake when it rolls out to newer TiVos.
Is there any deep reason why this isn't rolling out for Series 2 TiVos as well? If there's no technical barrier, this seems like an underhanded way to push otherwise happy TiVo owners to upgrade...
Posted by: Ravi | March 12, 2008 at 03:44 PM
Ravi - There is a technical barrier. YouTube encodes in H.264. The Series3 and TiVo HD have hardware H.264 decoders - the Series2 is limited to MPEG-2, and cannot decode YouTube videos. (And the CPU is not even close to powerful enough to do it in software.)
Posted by: MegaZone | March 12, 2008 at 04:06 PM
w00t!
I can't wait.
Posted by: rob friedman | March 12, 2008 at 04:13 PM
Isn't the Series 3 an HD TiVo?
Posted by: Ruben Gouveia | March 13, 2008 at 10:32 AM
snore....zzzzzz..... how many places do we need to watch homemade youtube clips.... and I can basically do this aleady by just downloading the youtube, quick convert and then pass to tivo for viewing as avi or mpeg... how about some real innovation Tivo!
Posted by: george | March 15, 2008 at 09:07 AM
"I can basically do this aleady by just downloading the youtube, quick convert and then pass to tivo for viewing as avi or mpeg... how about some real innovation Tivo!"
Man, that sounds like a heck of a lot more work than marking something as a favorite, and being able to view it immediately on your TiVo. As you've said, a lot of YouTube is made up of goofy homemade videos and spending 10 minutes converting and uploading to my TiVo doesn't seem worth it to go that route.
Also, most of my family can easily use a TiVo but would have no idea how to convert video or remotely load it on their tivo, so it is a step in the right direction.
Posted by: Matt Haughey | March 17, 2008 at 12:47 PM
George, what you are doing is violating copyright laws. I'm happy to pay Tivo fees to keep Homeland Security from remotely searching my hard drive. Like it or not we no longer live in the America we grew up in.
Posted by: Max Orbit | April 10, 2008 at 10:57 AM