I came across a little capsule profile of Jim Denney, TiVo’s VP of product marketing, at TVWeek.com today. Fairly standard stuff really, and most of it is stuff we’ve seen before. But there were a couple of bits I found interesting. First, he confirmed what I think most of us have figured out – that the TiVo HD is TiVo’s main product at this point.
This year, “TiVo HD has become our main stock-keeping unit in retail,†said Mr. Denney, who declined to disclose specific sales or a percentage of units sold.
Perhaps more interesting is an indication that HD content is finally coming to Amazon Unbox on TiVo:
Unbox, the content-downloading service TiVo started with Internet retail leader Amazon.com last year, can’t process HD content, though the companies will announce HD capabilities “in the not too distant future,†Mr. Denney said.
This has been eagerly anticipated since the release of the TiVo Series3. Over a year ago the lead engineer on Amazon Unbox indicated that they were working on 16:9 aspect ratios and HD content, but little has been said since then. So it is nice to see something from an official representative that indicates it is still in the works, even though everyone figured it must be just to keep pace with the market. Personally I suspect it will be tied up with the YouTube update which will enable MPEG-4/H.264 decoding. Using H.264 for HD content would greatly reduce the download sizes compared to trying to use MPEG-2.
