“TiVo appears to be acting unilaterally, disregarding established rights of content owners to participate in decisions regarding the distribution and exploitation of their content,” an NBC Universal spokesperson told Hollywood’s Daily Variety trade paper.

Check out the article. It isn’t a completely unexpected reaction, but it is still lame. Old media companies wanting to control how consumers access the content – mainly charging for the DVDs, OnDemand, downloads, etc.

TiVo has filed a patent application for a ‘ Multimedia mobile personalization system’ using RFID. New Scientist picked up on the patent and reported it. I was alerted by the coverage in ZatzNotFunny

The idea is that a user would have an RFID tag that would be picked up by the remote and/or DVR, so each user could have a personalized profile – recordings, play lists, etc – which would be automatically selected by their RFID tag.

When it comes to buzzwords, TiVo’s announcement Monday was loaded: quick, easy, download, TV shows, mobile, PSP and, of course, iPod.

CNet put together a little FAQ about TiVo’s announcement.

Following comments made last month at the DigitalLife show, as reported here, TiVoPony today (re)confirmed that TiVo is working on Mac support for TiVoToGo, as well as the iPod & PSP support announced today, in two posts at TiVoCommunity.com: here and here.

Regarding the Macintosh…

Yes, we intend to support it, but not in the February release. Macintosh support for the new features announced today is planned for mid-2006.

And:

I did not intend for my statement to exclude playback on the Macintosh. My understanding is that that should be supported as well, in the same timeframe (mid-2006).

TiVoPony, aka Bob Poniatowski, is in Product Marketing at TiVo.