TiVo turns away 3rd party developers at their own risk. More and more the other vendors are opening up their systems a little at a time. Cable companies are starting to talk up the features of tru2way and the ability to run 3rd party applications on their cable STBs. It is unlikely that they’ll throw the doors wide open to any developers, but the door is open a crack now and if it goes well it will inevitably lead to more support for applications.

TiVo should get out in front and built an ecosystem while the market is still open and before anyone else does it. Well, before anyone else big – since there are already other STBs with open application platforms for 3rd party extentions.

TiVo has partnered with companies that really don’t want to allow third party access to their systems: DirecTV, which went through a period of almost unbridled pirate hacking of their conditional access system – people breaking down the binary code on the chip in the access card – and cable companies, which seem to barely want to share basic information with their own consumers, let alone allow some hax0rs internal access to their systems.

Personally I think we’re lucky that TiVo doesn’t shut down that access altogether; look at how long DirecTV subs have been kept – still – waiting for media sharing features.

I suspect it’ll be a while before TiVo is in a position to actively assist third party developers due to fear, loathing and misunderstanding from the companies with whom TiVo has to make nice.