The 10×10 Movie List you don’t want to miss

Posted on Tuesday, July 1, 2008 by MegaZone

TiVo’s latest newsletter:

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iTWire Gets Hands-On With Australian TiVo, And Likes It

Posted on Tuesday, July 1, 2008 by MegaZone

While TiVo may not be available to Australian consumers until July 29th, Australian tech site iTWire got some hands-on time with one today and liked what they saw. The author saying “it lives up to my high expectations.” As he put it:

The Australian TiVo offers the four vital features that almost every other PVR on the Australian market lack – a proper Electronic Program Guide, a “Season Pass” feature, intelligent storage management and a generous margin for error when it comes to scheduling recordings.

He seems to have laid to rest the unsubstantiated rumor that the Australian TiVo would somehow block ad skipping by saying it has fast-forward, but not a 30-second skip. However, he doesn’t clarify if he tried the SPS30S 30-second skip backdoor that US TiVo units have, or was just referring to the fact it isn’t a standard feature. I suspect the latter. He also answers a question I had about the eSATA port by saying it is not currently active and will be activated in a future firmware update.

Australian TV networks are worse than US networks when it comes to sticking with a published schedule. They regularly start early and run late, which will make TiVo’s padding abilities useful. But it sounds like TiVo has a special trick up its sleeve for Australia. According to iTWire it will automatically pad recordings by 10 minutes during prime time – ending recording 10 minutes after the scheduled program end (the time is adjustable). And recordings of live programs are automatically extended by an hour, which sounds like a nice improvement on the reminder message US units received in a recent update. This sounds just like the ‘soft padding’ that has been oft requested in the US, and I hope we see this development re-imported back to the states. I do kind of presume it only auto-pads recordings when the tuner is free and nothing else is scheduled to record, of course.

All in all it was a very positive review, good news for TiVo’s prospects down under.

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Onkyo To Re-Enter HD Disc Market With Blu-ray

Posted on Tuesday, July 1, 2008 by MegaZone

Consumer electronics vendor Onkyo announced that they will release their first Blu-ray player later this year, according to Pocket-lint. Onkyo had been one of the few CE vendors to support HD DVD, but they dropped their HD DVD support in February – shortly before Toshiba pulled the plug on HD DVD completely.

Onkyo’s move into Blu-ray could be interesting. They shook up the AV receiver market by introducing receivers with fairly low prices yet a lot of features, causing competitors to slash prices and revise their lineups to retain market share. (Coincidentally I ordered an Onkyo TX-SA606 receiver to replace my suddenly dead Pioneer unit just yesterday.) If they follow the same with with their Blu-ray players, it could shake up the market. Onkyo pledges full support for Blu-ray’s audio and video capabilities, which would seem to indicate they’re player will be Profile 2.0 / BD-Live capable.

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TiVo Announces Stop||Watch Results For May 2008

Posted on Tuesday, July 1, 2008 by MegaZone

TiVo today issued a press release announcing the commercial and program rankings from their Stop||Watch service for May 2008. And, as has been the norm, we see that the top viewed commercials don’t necessarily air during the top ranked programs, running counter to traditional ratings-based ad sales.

“The May data demonstrates that running a commercial during a successful program does not guarantee that people will see it, especially if they are Timeshifting and watching the show later,” said Todd Juenger, Vice President & General Manager, TiVo Audience Research & Measurement. “Grey’s Anatomy had the top four Timeshifted episodes, but only managed to sneak one spot into the Top 10. On the other hand, House didn’t have any episodes in Top 10 Timeshifted viewing, but placed four of the top Timeshifted commercials.”

The press release is full of data, so check it out of you’re interested.

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Time Warner Moving Channels To SDV In Kansas City

Posted on Tuesday, July 1, 2008 by MegaZone

The TV Barn blog has posted a letter Time Warner Cable sent out to customers in Kansas City, MO. It announces that they intend to begin migrating “lesser-viewed channels” to SDV beginning August 20, 2008. They’ve done a fairly decent job providing information and being non-alarmist, it looks like they’ve cribbed from a recent letter sent out by Cox. The TWC letter reads, in part:

The current generation of CableCARD-compatible devices sold at retail are only capable of accessing our one-way services. They were not designed to be compatible with SDV, which is a two-way service. As a result, once the channels listed above are migrated to SDV, they no longer will be available to UDCPs. However, Time Warner Cable has worked with the rest of the cable industry and TiVo Inc. to develop an external device called a Tuning Adapter that will allow certain UDCPs, including TiVo Series 3 and TiVo HD digital video recorders, to access channels delivered using SDV.

We expect to be able to offer Tuning Adapters to customers with compatible UDCPs later this year. At that time we will provide you with additional information on availability and device compatibility. It is currently contemplated that the Tuning Adapter will be provided at no additional charge. Until the Tuning Adapter becomes available, however, a Time Warner Cable digital cable set-top box will be required to view channels migrated to SDV – even if you own a Tuning Adapter-compatible UDCP. In addition, certain non-TiVo UDCP models may not work with the Tuning Adapter.

Since The Tuning Adapter is expected to be available starting in July, perhaps they’ll have them available before the August 20th SDV migration. Though one has to wonder, with the Tuning Adapter planned to be available soon, why not just wait to perform the SDV migration until they have them available? Why risk inconveniencing and possibly alienating customers? Corporations move in mysterious ways.

Expect to see more and more of these letters over he coming months as more cable MSOs turn to SDV to add capacity for the growing volume of HD content, as well as additional channels.

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