Comments on: iFanboy, PixelPerfect, popSiren, Scam School, The Digg Reel, XLR8R TV, and Wine Library TV (Kind Of) Join TiVoCast

By: Rich W.

Rich W. — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 01:33:16 +0000

Some of the other ones that aren’t 100% reliable like I’d want are CrankyGeeks – they are sometimes several days late instead of the typical 1 day delay, same thing with DL.TV, sometimes it’s a week before I get it and one week the episode never came. Rocketboom is hit or miss as to if it comes daily or not. The vast majority of them might be 100% reliable, I must just have subscriptions to all the ones with problems.

By: MegaZone

MegaZone — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:25:41 +0000

I’ve heard the same kind of comment from others, which is odd since most of my TiVoCast subscriptions (and I subscribe to a lot of them) work fine nearly all of the time. GeekBrief.TV has been the real problem case, but as Stephen Mack commented GBTV/Mevio stopped delivering new episodes for TiVoCast. I don’t subscribe to the other PodShowTV/Mevio programs, but I suspect the same happened there.

Some delay compared to the web isn’t surprising, as TiVoCast is a different encode for most of these sites and I’m sure it is a lower priority. So they do all of their web-encodes and get them out, then do the MPEG-2 encode for TiVoCast. And if they have any other special deals, like DivX Connected, maybe they put those first. For bigger groups like Revision3 they probably have an encoder farm to handle it, but I know, for example, that Calli on GBTV used to talk about doing their different encodes manually. I have had a few episodes from Next New Networks, here and there, which didn’t play correctly. But that’s almost certainly a bad encode by NNN.

I think the TiVo-provided infrastructure is reliable, but they rely on the various content producers to supply the content.

By: Rich W.

Rich W. — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:20:48 +0000

I’m happy to see this new content too – but I’m very leary of subscribing to any of them. Too many times I start enjoying a TiVoCast and then they stop being reliable and updating on a regular basis or we get the shows many days or weeks after they are posted to the website. Any word on how reliable these feeds will be? I really miss GeekBrief.TV I still think TiVo should put efforts into getting the system reliable and consistent before adding more and more content to manage.