I’ve saved the best for last, not that Nero Move it and Nero 9 aren’t great products, but this is the one I’m most excited about - Nero LiquidTV | TiVo PC! LiquidTV | TiVo PC (henceforth just LiquidTV to keep it simple) is the culmination of the TiVo-Nero partnership announced last November, and reconfirmed this June. It brings the TiVo experience to your Windows XP or Windows Vista PC.

It turns your PC into a TiVo DVR with a user experience very similar to that of a standalone TiVo. Based on the web conference Nero held last Friday, and the press packet images, I suspect the software may be based on the codebase developed for the Comcast cable software. It has a similar look and feel and some of the features previously unique to the OCAP/tru2way software, such as PIP video in the menus. But it goes beyond the capabilities of the standalone TiVo, since it is on the PC, by allowing you to easily burn DVDs of the content or easily transcode and transfer content to your portable devices. Users familiar with the TiVo interface will have no trouble using LiquidTV, in fact the retail box comes with a TiVo peanut remote.

There are two versions of the product, a downloadable software-only version for $99.99, which includes one year of TiVo service. Or a retail box with hardware for $199.99, which also includes one year of TiVo service. The service is $99.99 per year after the first year, and you can try the download free for 30-days before buying. It will launch in the US, Canada, and Mexico on October 15, 2008. Availability in other areas of the world isn’t mentioned, but it must be coming - and that’s not just a guess, one of the images in the press kit was of a DVB-T antenna for the retail product. Only DVB-T isn’t used in the US, Canada, or Mexico, so I suspect that was a little ‘oops’ and it is for a version destined for other countries.

EDIT: Ah, here’s a confirmation from an article in the NZ Herald:

Joshua Danovitz, vice president and general manager of international business at TiVo, said the plan is to launch it in Europe next year, including in Nero’s home country, Germany. Britain is the only European country where TiVo currently has subscribers.

“It’s really part of a global TiVo strategy,” Danovitz said.

The hardware included in the retail box includes a TiVo peanut remote, an IR blaster transceiver, and a USB TV tuner card. The tuner is a Hauppauge HVR-950Q which supports NTSC analog and ATSC digital signals from antenna, analog cable, and clear QAM digital cable. Nero also says they support all USB, PCI, and PCIe TV Tuner cards and a list of all confirmed tested cards will be posted on their website. It will also work with capture cards fed by external cable boxes or satellite receivers, though it only supports one set-top box amongst the four tuners.

The remote, tuner card, IR blaster, and the mystery DVB-T antenna:

The remote looks like it is based off of the peanut that came with the Humax and Toshiba Series2 DVD-RW combo units, with DVD controls and a stop button in place of the DVR 1-2 slider found on non-DVD peanuts. Which makes sense as LiquidTV does have disc playback features. I do wish they offered some kind of remote-only hardware bundle for those who already have tuner cards but would like the remote to use with the product.

LiquidTV goes beyond standalone TiVo units in other ways as well. It supports up to four tuners, twice as many as an existing TiVo, and recording time is limited only by your hard drive capacity. Want more time? Just add more capacity to the PC. CableCARD support has not been tested, but on the conference with Nero Friday they said it should probably work if installed on a Windows Media Center PC with CableCARD support. I’d love to hear from anyone who tries that as to how it goes.

LiquidTV has all of the features you’d expect from a TiVo product - Season Passes, WishLists, TiVo Suggestions, Trick Play, and KidZone. Online scheduling is also available, just as with with standalone units. Being on a PC there are options from within the program menus to save a show to a portable device like an iPod or PSP, to burn it to DVD, or to save it to an archive format (H.264) to save space.

There are also some new additions to the Now Playing list - category folders. Standalone TiVo users are probably familiar with the TiVo Suggestions folder, and perhaps the HD Recordings folder, but LiquidTV also adds folders for Movies, Sports, and Kids content.

But LiquidTV has another fantastic trick up its sleeve. Avoiding one of the worst mistakes ReplayTV made with their PC software, LiquidTV | TiVo PC will communicate with standalone TiVo units on your network! You can transfer content between a PC running LiquidTV and a standalone TiVo using Multi-Room Viewing, just as you can between standalone units on a network. The TiVos show up in LiquidTV’s Now Playing List, and vice-versa. So it really is like having another TiVo on your network.

There are a number of official screenshots from the press kit:

I also took a few screen captures of my own during the web conference Friday:

I’m hoping to get a review copy to try on my new laptop to give you some first hand impressions. From what I’ve seen in the press packet and the presentation last Friday, I think Nero and TiVo have done a great job creating a first rate PC DVR software package. And the iconic TiVo remote is a nice touch. It is a nice alternative to MCE, SageTV, or BeyondTV. The one thing I’m not that happy with is the subscription pricing of $99.99 a year. That’s the same as yearly MSD for a standalone TiVo, but the standalone units have features, such as TiVoCast and HME, not to mention official CableCARD support, which LiquidTV lacks. And there is clearly no hardware subsidy to cover. $100 for the software the first year seems fair to me, but for additional years I’d like to see them drop the fees a bit. But that’s a minor issue I think. This could really open up global markets for TiVo, as users bring their own PC and all that’s really required is an EPG source for a new territory.

EDIT: TiVo has also issued a press release now.

Press release:
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The second big announcement from Nero today is Nero 9, the new version of their flagship software most often thought of in the context of CD/DVD burning. But it does so much more - ripping, burning, editing, backing up, playing, and uploading music, photos, and video. The Nero StartSmart interface provides a convenient one-stop interface to all of the product features.

Nero 9 adds GraceNote integration for automated metadata retrieval and improved experiences in Nero ShowTime for playback and Nero Vision for editing. And Nero Live for Vista MCE and the Nero Vista Sidebar Gadget add more features for users of Windows Vista. For backups the Rescue Agent has been completely revised

The revised Nero ShowTime has an all-new UI, GraceNote metadata support, and shuffle for playlists and audio CD tracks. But perhaps most interesting is support for new formats. encrypted AVCREC is supported for HDTV on DVD in Japan. The Matroska Video (.mkv) video format is supported. And FLAC is supported for lossless audio playback.

Nero Vision supports AVCHD, the format used by HD camcorders. And it has a ‘tape scan’ feature where it can transfer the contents of the tape at high speed to preview it, allowing you to select just the sections you want to transfer at full quality. It is similar to have most scanners allow you to do a preview scan and then select only the parts you want to scan fully. A big time saver.

It also includes Ad Spotter, an automated commercial recognition system. This makes it easier to cut the commercials out of recorded content before burning it to disc. It will flag what it thinks are commercials, allowing you to remove those sections. It also has an interesting Music Grabber function, designed to allow you to pull just the audio out of a video and save it as MP3. So if you record a music video you can rip the audio out and take the song with you on your iPod, etc.

And, of course, it still has the usual features - templates to ease media creation, wizards, special transition effects, DVD menu creation, etc. Just expanded and improved.

The one thing I was surprised by on the call is that Nero 9 apparently does not support .tivo files - the files created by TiVoToGo. This surprised me because TiVo and Nero announced a partnership last November, and Roxio, who is also partnered with TiVo, supports .tivo files in their Creator product on Windows and Toast on Mac. So it would’ve seemed to be a no-brainer for Nero to incorporate native .tivo support in Nero 9. Now, that’s the official word from the call last Friday. It is possible that Nero 9 does recognize .tivo files, just not officially. I wasn’t given a preview of the software to check for myself. If anyone grabs Nero 9 and tries it, leave a comment.

A Blu-ray authoring plug-in is also available for Nero 9, allowing you to author Blu-ray video discs for playback in any Blu-ray deck, PS3, etc. Perfect for archiving or distributing copies of the high-definition content from your HD camcorder.

Nero 9 is available today for for Windows PCs with an MSRP of $99.99, and the Blu-ray plug-in is available for just $9.99. Existing Nero users can upgrade online.

After seeing the presentation on Friday, and looking through the press materials, I just may pick this up for my new laptop. (Which arrived last Thursday.)

Press release:
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Nero was kind enough to invite me to a web conference on Friday to preview three new products that they’re announcing today: Nero Move it, Nero 9, and Nero LiquidTV. I’ll start by with Nero Move it.

Move it is an interesting product which aims to solve the problem of device proliferation and getting your content on the various devices, as well as moving content between them. The general idea is a drag and drop interface. You can select device one on the left, device two on the right, and then drag content back and forth between them. It handles photos, audio, and video content, and a myriad of devices - music players, PMPs, cell phones, cameras, etc. It will also handle transcoding, as well as uploading your content to YouTube, MySpace, and My Nero.

Here’s some official screen shots:

I also took some screen shots during the web conference on Friday:

So if you have content on your PC, iPod, PSP, cell phone, Nero Move it can keep everything synchronized, and also make sure the content is in the proper format for that device. If your device isn’t listed in the extensive default list of devices you can also create a new device profile. Or if you prefer different settings for one of the included devices you can also alter the default settings.

Move it will also handle ripping content from CDs and copying your content from mobile devices to the PC to backup your media files. In addition to uploading content to online services it can also download content to synchronize it to your devices to take it on the go. Renaming, copying, deleting, sorting, etc, it is all in there. You can even edit the meta data on the files - artist, album, description, etc.

Nero Move it will be available today, September 29th, for $49.99 for Windows PCs.

Press release:
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According to TWICE, Digeo is working on two Moxi cable DVRs. The first will be distributed through Charter later this month, to also be followed by ‘a second MSO’. It’s only four months after they announced this the first time. Back in May at The Cable Show Digeo announced that Charter would carry the Moxi 3012 HD DVR by the end of 3Q08. So they have less than two weeks to meet that goal.

Of course, back in January Digeo’s then COO, now President, Greg Gudorf told me that their cable DVR would ship by the end of 1Q08. So we’ll see how this roll out goes.

The other Moxi DVR will be a CableCARD consumer product sold at retail and expected to ship in January. That will be a year after Digeo suddenly canceled all of their planned consumer products, just days after showing them at CES and talking up the launch plans.

Details on the consumer product are thin, I’m presuming they’ll have something to say about it at CES in January. Of course, they did last year too. Unsurprisingly it will be a CableCARD-enabled DVR, and it will not be tru2way-enabled. It sounds like they’re pitching all the same features they were on the canceled products - music and photo access, content partners, home control integration, etc. For music content Digeo has lined up FineTune, Rhapsody and Sirius and they have Flickr for photos.

The one new item that I found interesting is that they’re implementing DLNA support. I’d like to see more products supporting DLNA, standards are good and DLNA has growing support across a number of products such as the Xbox 360, PS3, HP Media Smart TVs, Blu-ray players, etc.

Digeo is also apparently still working on their Moxi TV for PC software, which I was told was in beta and close to release at CES 2008 in January. Though according to TWICE they have it running on XP, Vista, and Media Center versions of Windows now, and not just XP as at CES. No word on when it might be available to consumers.

Gudorf told TWICE that Digeo is working on future products for post-July 2009 which will support tru2way. Digeo signed the tru2way accord in June. But I’m not even going to devote any mental energy to that until Digeo manages to ship something to consumers.

Digeo started talking about launching new consumer products two years ago, in September 2006. (Which I picked up, amusingly enough, from an article in TWICE.) I talked to them at CES 2007 where they were showing mock ups and no real products with the promise of shipping later in the year.

They insisted they’d ship in time for the 2007 holidays up through September. (Oddly enough, another article from TWICE. Is covering Digeo a September tradition for them?) Then in November they admitted they weren’t going to ship in 2007.

Then I talked to them again at CES 2008, and they were showing off some of the same mock-ups they’d had at CES 2007, as well as some actual products. Just a week later they canceled the products and laid off nearly half of their staff. Digeo’s Gary Gudorf talked to me the next day to offer clarifications, including that their cable MSO product would ship by the end of 1Q08, which it didn’t.

We didn’t hear anything else until April when details on the cable product emerged. And then in May they exhibited at The Cable Show and issued a press release announcing Charter’s intention to carry it. In June Digeo signed the tru2way accord.

And now here we are in September again, two years after they first announced their intention to enter the consumer DVR market, and they’re promising a box ‘expected to ship in January’. You’ll pardon me if I don’t hold my breath. Assuming they do exhibit at CES in January, I’ll check out their offerings, again. As I said when I covered them this year, I think they have some good design points. But none of it matters until they manage to get a box on retail shelves.

I hear it’ll come bundled with Duke Nukem Forever.

Tipped off by EngadgetHD.

EDIT: This got some attention in AVS Forum, including from a Charter rep, who wasn’t encouraging:

Ironically yesterday I got whispers from a contact in St Louis who works with someone who’s got a beta 3012 (Don’t get hopes up, so far it seems only a few elite managers and tech ops people in St Louis have gotten to beta this unit)

Apparently it’s still got quite a few bugs, which I think is very odd, given really all they needed to do was improve on the existing hardware and leave the software alone.

At any rate I don’t expect to see them in 2 weeks, heck at the rate things are going, I’d consider us lucky if we see them before Q3 2009

I’d say I’m surprised or that this is unusual so close to a planned release - but frankly this is what I’ve come to expect from Digeo. They’ve had one product actually make it to market, the BMC9000 STB series from Motorola running the Moxi software. But that launched back in 2004 and has been out of production for a long time now. At its peak it only reached around 400,000 users, and the number of Moxi uses is believed to be much smaller now as units have been replaced with newer, non-Moxi DVR models. Unsurprisingly the main MSO to use Moxi was Charter, which, like Digeo, is controlled by Paul Allen. But even with it being ‘in the family’ Charter’s use of Moxi was minor.

Moxi’s history since they were acquired by Digeo has been one of failed execution. Early on Moxi was on their way to being a competitor in the consumer DVR space and they had some cutting edge plans, then Digeo acquired them and refocused them on cable MSOs instead of retail. Digeo acquired Moxi way back in 2002 - and in six years what have they done? One product which never achieved more than minor market penetration, and is now well out of date and discontinued. Aside from that they have a history of press releases and announced partnerships, awards won for products announced but never shipped, staff layoffs, and repeated product delays and cancellations. If they didn’t have Paul Allen backing them I don’t see how they’d still be in business. Digeo needs to ship a product, a good product, to significant numbers of users, if they want to earn consumer trust again.

Last night Sling Media released updated the SlingPlayer for Windows 2.0 Public Beta with the release of the second beta build. The new build, .457, replaces the first beta build, .447, and can be downloaded from the Sling Media website. (Also for Canada.) Users who had previously installed Public Beta 1 will be prompted to auto-update SlingPlayer to the new beta build.

Disclaimer: I work for Sling Media as a Beta Manager.

Pop quiz time!

Hypothetically, given that someone was considering buying this laptop:

1. Would you recommend another laptop with similar specifications instead? Consider as constraints that a screen resolution of 1680×1050 is considered a minimum requirement, the physical dimensions should be similar and certainly not much larger, Blu-ray support is desired, and, while not a requirement, AMD is favored. A lower price is always a plus.

2. Bonus essay - justify your answer to #1.

3. Extra credit - try to convince this person to consider a Mac.

The folks who let us watch our TVs wherever we happen to be are offering Windows users a sneak peek at the next version of the software that makes it all work. Sling Media this morning announced a public beta of SlingPlayer for Windows version 2.0, which will be available on the Sling Media Downloads page for anyone who wants to take it out for a spin. Key features of the update include an integrated program guide, a video buffer right in the SlingPlayer client software, and centrally managed Sling Accounts.

Sling’s integrated Guide feature puts a schedule right on the user’s laptop or desktop computer, making it easy for those who want to watch live programming from their Slingbox-connected home TV to see what’s on and choose a program without the delays of accessing a distant set-top box’s program guide and squinting at text that’s traveling halfway around the world.

A live video buffer right in SlingPlayer will let users pause, rewind, or fast-forward through up to an hour of video, whether or not there’s a TiVo or other DVR hooked to the Slingbox on the other end. Those who do have a DVR can still use its capabilities, but will have the option of pausing, etc., locally, without the delays involved in remote-control signals being transmitted over the net.

Sling Accounts will allow users to store their personalized program guide settings and channel line-ups, favourite channels, and Slingbox IDs and passwords on Sling Media’s central servers. This should eliminate the need to reconfigure SlingPlayer’s settings each time it’s installed on a new laptop, office desktop, or even cybercafe kiosk.

The company says the long-awaited Clip+Sling feature, announced over a year and a half ago at CES 2007, didn’t make it into the public beta. The release of Clip+Sling, which lets Slingbox owners create and share short segments of video from what they’re watching with anyone, is still pending while the company negotiates with content owners and distributors. The 2.0 software, though, will provide the underlying flexibility the company needs to release Clip+Sling and other new features.

Sling Media is also working on a new version of SlingPlayer for Macintosh, which will bring these features to Apple’s platform, but no time frame is available for a Mac update.