For two days only, Sunday June 29th and Monday June 30th, BestBuy.com is offering a free $100 gift card with all Blu-ray Disc players, plus free shipping.

This is actually part of a larger BestBuy.com Stars & Stripes Sale. it is online only, not available at Best Buy retail locations.

Alex over at TiVo Blog uncovered another nice TiVoToGo application for the Mac, TiVo Butler. I’m not a Mac user so I can’t try it out myself, but it looks like TiVo Butler has a lot of nice features, and TiVo Blog has a number of screen captures of the client.

As the cliche goes, necessity is the mother of invention. Since TiVo’s support for the Mac has lagged (far) behind their Windows clients, and the only official TiVoToGo solution for the Mac is paid-for software from Roxio, now the Mac probably has nicer 3rd party clients than any other platform.

Ninety-nine cent rentals are back at Amazon Unbox this week. This time they’re offering Wedding Daze, A Guy Thing, Kiss the Bride, Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine, Beach Blanket Bingo, and Muscle Beach Party – each just $.99.

Wow, Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine, that’s some classic cheese right there. (And inspiration, along with the sequel Dr. Goldfoot And The Girl Bombs, for the line “Goldfoot’s machine creates another fiend so beautiful they make you kill” from the Rob Zombie song “Living Dead Girl” off Hellbilly Deluxe. Though I prefer the remix off American Made Music to Strip By.)

But that’s not all, the $5.99 Summer Movie Sale which started last week is still running, with a little title shuffling – some titles are gone, some new titles have been added. This week the lineup includes Hitch, The Pursuit of Happyness, A League Of Their Own, Men in Black, Real Genius, Bad Boys, Bad Boys II, Big Fish, Richard Pryor: Here and Now, Not Another Teen Movie, Punch-Drunk Love, Men in Black II, Mo’ Money, Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip, The New Guy, 50 First Dates, You Got Served, School Daze, Saving Silverman, Big Daddy, Bottoms Up, Stir Crazy, Beverly Hills Ninja, The End of the Affair, Stealing Harvard, High School High, and Ali.

You’d almost think Will Smith had a big movie coming out soon and they wanted to get people prepped for the release. (If you’ve been living under a rock, Will Smith has a big movie, Hancock, coming out July 4th weekend.)

And one other thing, the Amazon has an exclusive on the classic film Kiss of the Spider Woman. The DVD is only pre-order, but you can purchase it for download it now for $9.99 or a $2.99 rental.

The Dish Network DTVPal digital-to-analog converter is now available from the official website. When it was first announced as the TR40 back at CES the price target was given as $39.99, the value of the government coupons, which would’ve made it ‘free’. However, between then and now things have changed, and the release pricing is $59.99, so the box is $19.99 after the coupon, plus $8.95 for shipping. So it will cost you $28.94 to get a DTVPal from the official site, if you have a coupon, or $68.94 without one. You can order one or two DTVPal’s at a time, though there is no discount on shipping for ordering two. Dave Zatz’s unboxing videos will give you a look at the DTVPal.

Disclaimer: I work for Sling Media. Sling Media is owned by EchoStar. EchoStar produces the DTVPal for Dish Network. Sling Media has nothing to do with the DTVPal. So, while you’re free to comment, this isn’t any kind of official feedback channel. Don’t expect comments here to get to EchoStar or Dish Network.

Mark recently covered the Palm Centro, and there is still a promotion running that can save you some money if you’re interested. And not the Centro is an option for even more users.

First off, I failed to cover this a couple of weeks ago. On June 12th the Palm Centro became available on the Verizon network. As is usual with the Centro, the standard price is $99.99 with a 2-year contract. But through July 6th it is eligible for the above deal, a $50 rebate that drops it to $49.99. And Verizon is offering a $29.99/month ‘email and web’ plan for the Centro.

And now, as of Monday, Palm is selling an unlocked GSM Palm Centro for $299. It is more than the $99.99 you can get with a subsidy locked phone from AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon, but those require a 2-year contract and only work on the purchase network. The unlocked GSM Centro has no contract requirements and it works on any GSM network, just stick in you SIM card.

And there’s more good news for all Centro owners. Google Mobile Maps has finally been updated for Palm OS, from 1.2.0.9 to 2.0.2.0 – including ‘My Location’. ‘My Location’ is a beta feature for Google Mobile Maps which uses the cellular network to estimate your location. It isn’t as accurate as GPS would be, but it can be pretty close. You can download it directly to your Centro by visiting http://m.google.com/gmm using the browser on the phone. Well, actually, I fibbed – it isn’t all Centro owners. My Location doesn’t work on the Sprint Centros – yet. Sprint users have to wait for a software update due this summer.

Actually, the update is available for all Palm OS Treo models as well. However, the ‘My Location’ feature only works on the Centro – for reasons yet to be explained. If you try to use it on a Treo, like my Treo 680, it tells you:

The My Location feature is not available for this device. It is available for Palm Centro phones.

Palm, and Google, claim that the issue is that the version of Palm OS on the Treo lacks the API’s required to support My Location. OK, well, I have an idea – update the blasted software to add the APIs! Is that really so hard? They’re doing it for the Sprint Centro!

Actually, it is worse than that. Reportedly the APIs are in the OS already, but they’re private so 3rd party developers like Google can’t access them. They’re used for the E911 location requirements for emergency services. So it would seem all Palm would have to do is make them public, as they are on the Centro.

I have a suspicion that it is really some stupid business decision to try to draw people to the Centro by giving it features the other models lack. Why do I suspect this? Because there is a freeware patch to GMM 1.2.0.9 for the GSM Treo 650 and 680 (sorry, not CDMA Treos nor the old Treo 600) which adds ‘My Location’ functionality! So, clearly, it isn’t a hardware issue on GSM Treos, and it isn’t even a big software issue if a 3rd party developer can hack together a patch! (It may well be possible for CDMA Treo’s as well, but the radio systems are different.) Even if the APIs used on the Centro are missing, it seems more like a convenient excuse. And, again, software can be updated. If Palm has any plans to do so it would be good customer relations to say so. At it stands it looks like they’re snubbing the users of their more expensive phones.

Things like this really make me less likely to stick by Palm, and more likely to jump to the first decent Android handset I can get. Heck, I’d even consider the iPhone now that it is 3G, if only they’d get it past 60GB storage so it could replace my iPod completely. And I’m not the only one upset by this, going by the comments on Palm’s blog. I’ll note that the moderate comments, so those comments are only those that Palm approved. And I know they haven’t approved all the comments they’ve received, because mine never appeared. Readers at Treonauts and Palm Infocenter are rather displeased as well.

If you’re looking for an inexpensive smartphone with a lot of capabilities, the Centro is the one I’d recommend. It has more features than many phones that cost far more. There are ‘feature phones’, which are a step down from smartphones, which cost more and don’t have as many features as the Centro, let alone the thousands of applications (many free) available for Palm OS. Palm could stand to improve their customer communications though.

TiVo has added another TiVoCast channel, City By City. It is another channel from ON Networks, and it describes itself as:

City by City, a travel show with a twist, is your virtual little black book for the swankiest cities across Europe. From Dublin to Istanbul, City by City is an insiders’ guide to fabulous, off the beaten path finds in each featured city. From hip, local hang-outs to 5 Star luxury hotels, the lovely Manjit Devgun takes you on a stylish discovery tour of the culture capitals of Europe.

You can subscribe online or on your TiVo via Find Programs & Downloads -> Download TV, Movies, & Web Video -> Browse Other Videos -> All -> City By City

Media Marketing Research company TRA, Inc. has announced an agreement with TiVo to bundle TiVo’s Audience Research Metrics with their own ‘Media TRAnalytics’ offering. TRA already has agreements with three cable MSOs for anonymous set-top data and anonymous data from TiVo will join this pool. They’ve dropped a press release to tout the deal.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have a Keyword Auto-Record WishList on my TiVo for ‘TiVo’, just for situations like this. Last night it caught the year 2000 episode of “I Love the New Millennium” on VH1, which featured TiVo. It is repeating several times this week, so you can hit that link to schedule it on your TiVo. It was a very positive bit, with various celebs singing the praises of TiVo and how it changed their lives. With a humorous tone of course, as is the nature of the show. The TiVo segment starts about 30 minutes in and lasts just over two minutes.

But the best bit, the bit that made me stop my TiVo to catch my breath from laughing, was that they, without explanation, flashed the (in)famous picture of Gizmodo’s Brian Lam reclining on a sofa, wearing TiVo antennae and cuddling his TiVo Series 3. The BLam pops up just before the 32 minute mark, for just a couple of seconds. Priceless.

Australian retailer Harvey Norman has confirmed a July 1st launch for TiVo in Australia, according to Current. It looks like Harvey Norman will have a three month exclusive on TiVo distribution, starting July 1st. The exclusivity arrangement was first broken by The Australian Financial Review, which reported that the release would be ‘mid-July’. However, Harvey Norman executive director, David Ackery, told Current that the launch date would be July 1. The exclusivity agreement will make them the only Australian source of TiVo for the Olympics, for which Seven Network has the Australian broadcast. The price is rumored to be AUD$700, though Ackery declined to confirm the rumors, saying that details will be released with the July 1st launch. The AFR also had some details on the deal between Seven Network and TiVo:

The original agreement required Seven to pay TiVo a fee for each subscriber it signed. Under the new deal, which was finalised in April, TiVo will be paid a royalty based on how many recorders are sold here.

TiVo’s main competition in Australia will be the Foxtel iQ2 DVR, which retails for AUD$200 and carries a monthly AUD$10 subscription fee. If the AUD$700 price and no monthly fee rumors for the TiVo are true, that would mean a 50 month break-even compared to the iQ2. Which the TiVo is being pitched as a premium product it remains to be seen how it will fare in the Australian market. AFR says Foxtel has a subscriber base of 1.4 million, 350,000 of which have picked up the original iQ DVR, and 15,000 which have picked up the newer iQ2.

I guess we’ll see in a week what all of the details are with regard to pricing and features.

EDIT: The Sydney Morning Herald has also picked up the story, and they have a few more details. One thing the AFR didn’t mention, the iQ2 costs AUD$10-15 on top of the standard Foxtel subscription (Foxtel is a Pay TV service), which runs AUD$37.95 up to AUD$105.95 a month, depending on the level of service. TiVo, on the other hand, will work with the free-to-air programs so there is no additional cost. That does make quite a big different in the break-even point between the two products.

From June 23rd through June 29th Buy.com is selling the Western Digital 500GB MyDVR Expander eSATA drive for just $149.99. They normally have it for $172.99, and the full MSRP is $199.99 – which is what TiVo.com sells it for. This is the only external eSATA drive officially approved for use with the TiVo Series3 or TiVo HD. It also works with the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300 Series DVRs.

They’re actually have a sale on a number of Western Digital external drives, if you’re also looking for more capacity on your PC:
Western Digital 750GB My Book Essential Edition USB 2.0 External Hard Drive $139.99
Western Digital Elements 500GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive $89.99
Western Digital 500GB My Book Essential USB 2.0 External Hard Drive $96.99
Western Digital 320GB My Passport Elite USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive – Bronze $148.99
Western Digital 1TB My Book Essential USB 2.0 External Hard Drive $197.99
Western Digital 500GB My DVR Expander eSATA External Hard Drive $149.99
Western Digital 320GB My Book Essential II USB 2.0 External Hard Drive $79.99
Western Digital My Book Home Edition 1TB – Triple Interface (USB 2.0, eSATA & FireWire 400) External Hard Drive $237.99