Walt Disney Studios Content Now Live On TiVo!

Posted on Thursday, October 30, 2008 by MegaZone

First announced in May, and reported last week to be launching soon, Disney content is now available for download on TiVo! Simply navigate to TiVo Central -> Find Programs & Downloads -> Download TV, Movies, & Web Video, and you should see a new item in the menu – Walt Disney Studios. Within Walt Disney Studios you can select from Most Popular, New Arrivals, Browse Walt Disney Studios, and About CinemaNow.

The latter is due to this offering being brought to TiVo through a partnership with CinemaNow, which has digital distribution rights to Disney content. While the offering is currently limited to Disney films, the CinemaNow TiVo page has a FAQ which states:

For now only Walt Disney® Studios rental movies can be watched on your TiVo DVR.
Stay tuned as we are working to add more selections soon.

If you are browsing the CinemaNow website, look for the ‘Plays On TiVo’ logo on the title detail page to ensure this video can play on TiVo DVR.

And back when it was first announced I did check with TiVo and was told it would include non-Disney content from CinemaNow. So we can look forward to expanded content offerings going forward. The current offering features a selection of over 100 Walt Disney Studio titles, including both animated classics like Dumbo and modern blockbusters like Jet Li’s Hero.

This service is available on the TiVo Series2, TiVo Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL. The current offering is all SD, but hopefully we’ll see HD content added. You can get more information from TiVo’s CinemaNow/Disney page.

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Netflix Streams Onto TiVo

Posted on Thursday, October 30, 2008 by MegaZone

Hmm, I wonder if I upset someone over at TiVo? I didn’t get any advance notice on this one. Well, anyway, on to the news. Correction, their PR firm did email me – a little after 20:00, less than four hours before the embargo lifted at midnight eastern. That’s a little late to be letting folks know about a major announcement, especially as I know others got the word around 15:00. Unfortunately, that was after the last time I’d checked email before midnight. I might’ve caught it, but I’m down with a bad cold and not hovering online as much as I normally do. I only caught it after seeing the news elsewhere.

Netflix streaming is coming to TiVo – very soon. It is great news, but it isn’t too surprising. TiVo and Netflix first talked about partnering over four years ago, though that initial deal seemed to fizzle when Netflix had trouble getting content rights.

In the meantime the market has completely changed. Netflix has rolled out their streaming service and TiVo has added streaming support to their platform for YouTube. And, of course, movie downloads from Amazon and Jaman, with CinemaNow/Disney expected any day now. Content providers are much more open to digital distribution than they were four years ago, and the technology has improved as well. A lot of us have been expecting TiVo and Netflix to bring streaming to TiVo. Especially after Netflix made deals with LG and Samsung to stream to some their Blu-ray players.

This now gives TiVo content from four major services – Amazon, Jaman, CinemaNow (soon), and Netflix. The only major service left that I can think of is Blockbuster/Movielink. And, honestly, they’re not exactly the market leader. I suppose TiVo could work with VUDU to build a VUDU client into TiVo, but with all the other content I don’t know that it would be worth it for TiVo. More benefit for VUDU I’d think. The only thing left to make TiVo *the* platform for movies is HD content, and I’m sure that’s coming.

As Amazon VOD also offers streaming, I expect TiVo to bring that to their platform in addition to the downloads available today. And we’re all just waiting for HD content. There have been repeated hints and mentions of work toward bringing HD content downloads from Amazon to TiVo, and more recently Jaman and Cinema now. And just today Netflix announced they’ll be streaming in HD to Xbox 360. So maybe we’ll see Netflix in HD on TiVo as well.

What’s next for TiVo and broadband content? I think we’ll see them making deals with more content portal sites and networks, like Hulu.com and CBS.com. It is just logical, and TiVo already has the infrastructure to support such streaming sites. I think TiVo is making the right moves.

The Netflix streaming, like YouTube, will be coming to the TiVo Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL. It isn’t clear if they’ll be using H.264, like YouTube, or if the streams will be using VC-1 – which Netflix uses for their PC and Mac streaming. The TiVo hardware is capable of supporting both codecs, but VC-1 hasn’t been used to date. Why no Series2 support? As with YouTube, the hardware doesn’t support the newer codecs.

Picked up from Zatz Not Funny.

The press release:
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Posted in Broadband, NetFlix, Press Release, TiVo | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

New Interactive TV And Advertising Platforms Get Trialed

Posted on Wednesday, October 29, 2008 by MegaZone

In the past couple of days I’ve had a couple of press releases cross my (virtual) desk relating to some new interactive TV technologies tied to advertising, which sound like they’re targeting the same market as TiVo’s interactive ad platform. The first to land was Backchannelmedia’s TV-to-Internet technology which is being tested by LIN TV Corp., a local television and digital media company, on the Hartford-New Haven stations WTNH-TV ABC 8 and WCTX-TV MyTV 9 starting in November.

The technology works by allowing viewers to press a button on their remote when a small icon appears on the bottom of the screen. This ‘bookmarks’ the content, or offer, which is then forwarded to a personal website which is incorporated into WTNH.com. I think this is an interesting approach, one I’ve suggested TiVo use for advanced content in the past. Some content is simply better presented on a computer. And this could allow less sophisticated platforms, like a non-DVR cable box, to provide a level of interactive content by offloading it to the website.

Generically, being able to bookmark things on a website would be useful in other ways. For example, a number of Discovery channel shows will say things like “Visit our website for more content/behind the scenes/etc”, and it would be great to be able to push a button on the remote at that point and have a link to the content waiting for you on the PC.

The second press release announced that Time Warner Cable has licensed elements of an Enhanced TV (ETV) platform from Broadband Interactive Applications (BIAP). BAIP’s ETV User Agent will be incorporated into Time Warner Cable’s advanced advertising platform. It will allow TWC’s STB’s to run Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format (EBIF) applications, both created by TWC and third parties, such as the TV networks.

EBIF is a multimedia content format standard developed by the OpenCable project within CableLabs, which also developed OCAP/tru2way. EBIF is a core element of Canoe, a cable industry effort to develop an advanced advertising platform for all MSOs. Both the cable and broadcast industries will use EBIF to deliver advanced features to cable STBs.

The press releases are below:
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TiVo In Gadget Freak’s Farewell Top Five

Posted on Wednesday, October 29, 2008 by MegaZone

PC World’s Gadget Freak column is coming to an end after a five year run. And in his farewell post, Gadget Freak columnist Dan Tynan calls out the five best gadgets he’s encountered over the course of writing the column:

The best gadgets have certain qualities in common. They solve difficult problems simply and elegantly. They’re constantly ahead of the curve, adding new features before you realize you need them. And most important, they put you in control of your own digital destiny–so that you can make the decisions about what you want to do and how you want to do it.

Dan’s top five gadgets are: Apple iPod and iPhone, TiVo, iRobot Roomba, Sonos Sound System, and Nintendo Wii.

Seems like a respectable list to me. I would probably have few different choices, but each person has their own needs. TiVo would certainly be on my list as well, and probably my iPod.

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Comcast TiVo Heading To The Windy City, With A New Commercial

Posted on Wednesday, October 29, 2008 by MegaZone

Despite some ongoing issues, it looks like the Comcast TiVo software is heading to Chicago. Dave Zatz over at Zatz Not Funny caught this in Comcast’s earnings call today:

We are rolling out TiVo beyond the Boston market test, where things are going quite well and we are going to be introducing other cities, probably starting with Chicago in the first quarter next year

This isn’t too surprising as Chicago is one of two cities where Comcast has rolled out tru2way support (the other being Denver – maybe they’ll be next?), and, as Light Reading’s Cable Digital News points out, it is another territory where Comcast uses Motorola hardware. Still no word on when Comcast and TiVo will complete the work to being the software to Cisco/Scientific Atlanta DVRs.

Comcast is also running a new TV spot to advertise the TiVo software:

Posted in Cable, TiVo | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments