11/21/2005, 7:05am, EST
Monday, November 21st
New TiVo software transfers video to iPod
"The increasing popularity of mobile devices for viewing video such as Apple's iPod and the PSP device demonstrate the enormous consumer demand for entertainment on the go," said Tom Rogers, CEO of TiVo. "By enhancing our TiVoToGo(TM) feature, we're making it easy for consumers to enjoy the TV shows they want to watch right from their iPod or PSP -- whenever and wherever they want."
TiVo said it will begin testing the feature in the coming weeks with a select group of TiVo Series2 subscribers who own the Apple Video iPod or PSP devices. TiVo said it plans to make the feature available to its entire standalone TiVo Series2 subscriber base as early as the first quarter of next year.
Last year, TiVo made available to all its Series2 subscribers the TiVoToGo feature. The TiVoToGo feature allows subscribers to transfer TV shows from their DVR to a laptop or PC over their home network. From the PC, subscribers can watch the shows, or transfer them to devices compatible with Microsoft Portable Media Center format. The announcement today added more support for the Apple's iPod and Sony PSP, as well as the ability to specify Season Pass recordings to conveniently transfer to the portable device via the PC overnight.
TiVo says that subscribers will need to purchase certain low-cost software to facilitate the transfer of content from the PC to these portable devices. The software is epected to cost between $15 and $30. To discourage abuse or unlawful use of this feature, TiVo intends to employ "watermark" technologies on programs transferred to a portable device using the TiVoToGo feature that would enable tracking of the account from which a transferred program originated.
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There is no mention of system requirements in this article. The pessimist in me expects that the version of TiVoToGo with iPod video transfer will be no different than the current version--Windows only.
--an increasingly disillusioned TiVo subscriber
...damn you TiVo!!!
If you've already bought and iPod and have tivo, you can basically have the napster/yahoo subscription plan by paying the service fee and downloading all you want...but unlike music, I don't really care if I own the shows or not. Odds are I'm not going to keep them indefinitely, and may only watch them two or three times total. And would rather buy the boxed set of a season for archiving. Even the resolution should be better.
NYT does have the service as still Window's only. But maybe Apple is the one dragging its feet. Not Tivo. How hard would it be for the two of them to enable TV show sharing between iTunes and a tivo on the local subnet like other media devices and allow you to stream the shows from within iTunes itself, also allowing iTunes to manage syncing to the iPod, possibly automatically. Not to mention this could work on both platforms, and if people own quicktime, don't they already have a MPEG4 license? So it might also be cheaper.
But would the iTVS really have a market then?
MhzDoesMatter
Well, if you already have a tivo, you should've paid for the lifetime subscription. Then there are no more fees, and then you have a 'free' subscription model and the ability to record as much as you want and keep it all. And regardless of whether you paid for the lifetime service, you can burn the stuff you want to DVD without paying even more money.
I've looked for alternatives, but all I could find was stuff that ran on computers (usually PCs), not separate boxes. Like I want to waste my time prettying up a PC to stick next to my TV set. (A mac isn't an option since no macs come with anything close to what you'd need for an entertainment system of any ilk).
Yeah, sounds real simple too! Just need to spend hours, know what the hell you're doing, not mind hacking apart your Tivo and risk really screwing it up. Plus the help pages aren't exactly structured or ordered in any sensible manner.
But besides that, there's no better way to go!
Oh, and by the way, lifetime subs are not available on DirecTV TiVos.
Nah, what fun would that be. Plus, I was just indicating the usual frustration most people have with this great "open-source" thing they hear about. Documentation generally sucks. Interfaces are for noobies, and consistency is disregarded in favor of adding more and more features.
Oh, and by the way, lifetime subs are not available on DirecTV TiVos.
Yeah, but at $5 a month, its a lot cheaper then regular tivo, and you need DirecTV anyway. Oh, and that $5 a month covers as many Tivos as you want.