Tivo today made some announcements (1, 2, 3 courtesy of /.) that brings their DVR closer to truly being God's Machine, but there is one necessary feature that is still lacking.
Currently, there are at least 4 stories in the pipeline involving DVR?s, but I?ll put this one at the top of the list so I can have some thoughts down on a current story. One post / article that I have been working on for a while is what the perfect DVR entails and if it is possible today. There are several sites and people working on aspects of this idea, and one of the goals of this site is to mention that work here (you were probably wondering what the heck is the purpose of this site is ? another future post). These new announcements today by Tivo, while not unexpected, do keep them at the top of the leaderboard as I see it for a while to come.
The next DVR I buy or build will need to support High Definition broadcasts. While the momentum is still building for this technology, even the limited amount of programming currently available make this a needed feature. Once a person sees there is an option for significantly better picture and sound (especially with prices falling), how could they be satisfied with recording the standard stream? There no doubt will be some technical issues considering the status of the standard and the significant hard drive space needed to store theses programs, but it?s good to officially hear the announcement that HD Recording is coming to their machines, even if it is currently only for the DirecTV market.
Archiving is another necessary feature for my next PVR. DVD recording is the best option at the moment (CD-R?s are slightly cheaper at the expense of limited capacity, external hard drives are in some ways convenient, but expensive), but the limitations on Tivo are a little disheartening (and silly). It?s interesting that a company who makes a device that uses Linux will force consumers to use an application that will only run on Windows (Sonic?s myDVD). Assuming that these DVD's will be playable in DVD players, it would just be another step to then rip these DVD's on a PC and have a copy of the show. The tech savvy will not even have to take this step, but ripping DVD's has become so simple that only the moderately tech knowledgeable consumer could do this. If this makes the content companies happy, so be it.
The feature that I support is Video-On-Demand or Internet Archiving - something that old ReplayTV's do to some extent out of the box and is especially functional with new sites. Hopefully, the content companies would be pushing this system to open a new revenue stream, though there would be nothing preventing end consumers from constructing such a sharing system in a legal manner.
Also while satellite radio is a technology it is easy to get excited about, it is a good move for XM to continue to move out of the car and into the home - since one of my biggest concerns about this industry was becoming too much of a niche market by being too focused on automobiles.
Two links on other blogs about Tivo's announcement.
PVRblog
Boing Boing
Found via byopvr.com:
Interesting bringing up the "free" (as in IP cost, not labor) competition, but I don't see how someone can beat out Tivo by selling these in boxes. While geeks building their own boxes to have total control (like I eventually plan to do makes sense), Tivo's advantage of mass production / buying power should always provide cheaper, if not the most powerful, hardware. Throw in the price break with the "it just works" out of the box for Grandma and Grandpa and Tivo should be doing well for a while.
I haven't looked at Freevo and MythTV in a while, so I am unsure how they are getting their guide information (and whether they are doing it in a guaranteed, legal way and not just parsing tvguide.com) - the other big feature Tivo (and ReplayTV) provides.
Posted by: boo at January 13, 2004 10:53 PM