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Tivo

What is TiVo?

TiVo is an advanced cable television service in the United States that uses DVR technology to enable users to record shows to the internal hard drive to be played back later. It allows users to search for programs by title, genre, actor, director, etc. The series 3 TiVo box is capable of recording HDTV both from antenna and cable.

Features:

• You can set the TiVo to record cable programs individually, or as an entire series, or any program involving a certain actor or director.
• Recordings are prioritized to resolve problems when recording programs that are scheduled to conflict.
• TiVo has a suggestion system similar to Netflix where users will rate shows they watch, and depending on how other TiVo users have rated their shows, suggestions will be made to the user about programs they made be interested in.
• One of the DVR features TiVo has is the “live buffer” allowing a user to pause or rewind “live tv” within a 30 minute window.
• TiVo units can also be setup as a network, and recordings can be transferred between units on the network, or to/from a home computer (TiVoToGo). Other media such as music and photos which are accessed can also be transferred between units using applications written for TiVo's Home Media Engine (HME) API.

Broadband content on TiVo

TiVo has been doing trials with broadcasting internet video content such as the Rocketboom video blog. In June 2006 TiVo announced TiVoCast, which is a broadband download service offering content from online sources. TiVo has also announced an agreement with BrightCove to provide additional broadband content.

TiVoCast

http://customersupport.tivo.com/LaunchContent.aspx?CID=EF670608-BB27-4DA9-B195-BC51F2347FBF
http://www3.tivo.com/tivo-tco/cds/index.do

TiVo – Rocketboom

http://research.tivo.com/rocketboom/
http://www.rocketboom.com

TiVo Videoblog Project

http://www.tivo.com/5.13.asp?messageType=videoblog

The Future for TiVo

TiVo and Comcast reached a nonexclusive distribution deal in March 2005, resulting in future co-developed products and TiVo service available over Comcast’s cable network.

Long Term Strategy:

• HDTV recording development
• Integrated tuning using CableCARD technology
• Downloading and viewing content from the Internet
• Allowing third parties to develop applications for the platform

My Experience with the TiVo Videoblog Project

I found it very difficult to get any information on the process of applying to broadcast content. After several phone calling and emailing attempts I gave up. The TiVo media contact Jeff Weir was not open to answering a few questions I had about the application process over the phone. So it doesn't seem like it would be very easy to broadcast a small vlog at this stage.