I get the feeling cooperative scheduling is pretty far down the To Do List for TiVo at this point. There are a number of things I’d prefer to see first now myself. For example, now that you can opt-in to having personal info uploaded (for Guru Guides and KidZone), your SPs, ARWLs, etc, should be visible and manageable on the TiVo.com website. Or some spin-off dedicated to that, whatever. With real-time communication any changes you make to the scheduling online can be sent to the TiVo immediately. With the power of the web and AJAX you could do some really interesting presentations of the data. Such as showing where conflicts exist, which shows won’t be recorded, allow bumping shows, etc.

And if you have multiple TiVos, you could assign bumped shows to another TiVo that has availability. Eventually that could evolve into automatic cooperative scheduling.

I think you may have missed one of the most obvious uses of XMPP though, and it’s something lots of people have been hoping to see for a long time now -> multi-room conflict resolution / cooperative scheduling. Just think how great it’d be if all your home tivo’s could sign into an XMPP chat room and send each other messages to coordinate their schedules, to-do-lists, etc. It’d be like a tivo botnet!

As for component input, I made a post about that during the show. I don’t think we’d see it from TiVo this year, but maybe something at CES 2009, perhaps. It is just becoming economically feasible now to do it in consumer gear, but the prices need to drop a bit more for TiVo I think. And product development always takes time. The TiVo HD was done as a rush project and I think it took about 8 months.

Note that Verizon FiOS does support CableCARD, people use the Series3 and TiVo HD with it.

Personally I just want folders on my Tivo for the TTG stuff. Would let me organize things into directories (Movies, Top Gear) that I wouldn’t have to scroll through (slowly) every time I want to watch something. This is a big deal to me, and if 2.6 Desktop does a good job of this I’ll be a happy camper.

Nevertheless if they could (a) make Tivo Desktop load more quickly, both at startup and when double clicked, (b) make the “Select Videos To Transfer” thing more reliable so it doesn’t barf due to a busy network and require you to restart, (c) make it possible to setup the conversions so they happen in the middle of the night, (d) figure out why sometimes the additions to iTunes don’t work, or log them and let me add them manually at the end, (d) let me set limits on the number of shows to keep (per show), etc. I’d be much happier. Any hint if/when any of this stuff is coming or if they even know about the issue?

With the Slingbox Pro HD coming out this year at $399 it would obviously be possible for Tivo to build an HD capable box capable of transcoding via Component, which would let them be compatible with IPTV setups that don’t use cable cards (like AT&T and Verizon), as well as Satellite. I wonder if it would be worth their trouble to offer something like this at this point? An alternate Series 3 member? I wonder how many they’d sell and what price they’d have to sell it at? Obviously this sort of transcoding is just becoming viable in this market, but over time the prices should come down…