Last night I had the idea to register TiVoLovers.com, and setup LJ’s domain mapping feature. So now, in addition to http://www.livejournal.com/community/tivolovers/ or http://tivolovers.livejournal.com/, http://www.gizmolovers.com/ will point here. Which makes it easier to refer people here – “Just go to TiVoLovers.com.”

TiVo’s announcements made a bigger splash: through its content partnership with Yahoo, TiVo Series 2 devices now offer a section for podcasts, with listings taken from the Yahoo Podcasts site. What’s more, TiVo, whose talks with Apple broke off recently, announced it will support the iPod as a TiVo-To-Go device sometime in early 2006.

With CableCARD just gathering steam, and TiVo’s HD CableCARD system due in mid-2006, the cable industry is already talking about what comes after CableCARD. Their concept is the Downloadable Conditional Access System (DCAS). DCAS would eliminate the need for specialized hardware, like a digital cable box or a CableCARD from your cable provider, and allow for a single, standardized digital cable receiver. Your cable provider would download the digital access keys to the receiver to enable it to work with their network. Basically standardized, secure hardware would allow downloadable software to take over the roll of the CableCARD. Right now they’re looking at DCAS possibly rolling out in 2008.

Dave Zatz over at ZatzNotFunny covered this in an entry today. Worth checking out.

Interestingly, the report filed with the FCC (PDF) has several mentions of bi-directional CableCARD it it sounds like devices are already being certified. That bodes well for TiVo’s unit.

For decades, the Nielsen Media Research audience measurement service has told networks and advertisers roughly how many people are watching, for example, ABC at 9 p.m. on a Wednesday. But as a growing number of people use TiVo or another service to record prime time shows for viewing later in the week or for watching on a laptop during a flight, the Nielsen ratings have gotten increasingly fuzzy.