The ARRIS Whole Home Solution consists of a Moxi Gateway six-tuner DVR and Moxi Players to deliver the content to sets throughout the home. In addition to cable television the Moxi Gateway includes support for DOCSIS 3.0 data services and VOIP for telephone service, MoCA connectivity, media sharing, and an option for WiFi. The WOW! offering will have a 500GB hard drive, which doesn’t seem like a lot when you have six tuners. It will hold up to 300 hours of SD content or 75 hours of HD content.

WideOpenWest will be branding this new offering as WOW! Ultra TV. Pricing is $25/month for the gateway and two players. They even have a video introducing it:

This news comes on the heels of ARRIS announcing that they’re finally giving up on the retail market. As the Moxi website now states:“The Moxi HD DVR and Moxi Mate are no longer available for purchase.” That effectively leaves TiVo as the only advanced DVR available at retail, certainly the only retail standalone CableCARD DVR. (No, I do not consider the Channel Master TV to be in the same category.)

Since ReplayTV’s demise, Moxi has been the only real contender as a competitor for TiVo, but their history is like a Keystone Cops routine when it comes to bungled launches and incomprehensible product plans. When the finally brought a unit to retail it was basically not marketed at all and therefore only known to those who already knew to look for it, and at a fairly high price. Since ARRIS acquired Moxi it has been clear that they’ve been focused on bringing the technology to the MSO market, with little interest in retail. So it isn’t a surprise that they’re pulling out, more that it took this long.

They offer a real competitor to TiVo in the MSO market, which might be a factor in TiVo’s recent deal with Pace. Pace is a major player in the MSO market and makes integrated gateway units, similar in hardware capabilities to ARRIS’s Moxi Gateway.

The Broadcom press release specifically mentions the BCM7425. That’s a MoCA 2.0 enabled chip that can simultaneously decode two HD video streams and transcode them for streaming, generally to portable devices. such a chip could be embedded in a set top box, or it could take the form of a standalone network-based transcoder that takes in the default HD streams, which are generally MPEG-2, and transcodes them to H.264 for streaming.

The ViXS press release speaks in more general terms about the XCode chip family. The Sling Media software has been integrated with the ViXS Xtensiv software stack for the XCode chips. The XCode family has varying features; the high-end 5100 can transcode six HD streams simultaneously while the 4200 can transcode dual streams. All of them have Ethernet support, so they could be embedded in an STB or used in a network-based transcoder. They don’t appear to have MoCA support, but a separate MoCA transceiver chip could handle that, as in the TiVo Premiere Elite.

Support for Sling’s streaming technology in these chips opens the door to the potential for SlingLoaded devices from vendors other than EchoStar. I think that would be very interesting. While EchoStar’s own efforts to market SlingLoaded devices haven’t met with much success, to date they’ve been limited to the Dish Network ViP922 DVR in the US and the EchoStar HDS-600RS Freesat+ DVR in the UK, licensing the tech to other vendors could be a more successful approach.

MVPDs have been showing an increasing interest in place shifting technology as a value add to attract customers. Dish, of course, already has the ViP922 and the Sling Adapter for the ViP722. DirecTV has the Nomad ‘store and forward’ network transcoding box. Various MSOs have trialed or tested place shifting hardware. Building it into their STBs, or offering a network-based add-on box to enable streaming, could be a way for MSOs to leverage the market leading Sling technology.

TiVo was showing of a technology demo of just such a box at CES, though there is no indication that Sling Media’s tech was involved. Still, now that EchoStar and TiVo aren’t involved in a blood feud, perhaps they can finally combine their respective best in breed technologies. TiVo’s demo box has a single Ethernet connection and power, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was using one of the ViXS chips. I doubt it is using the Broadcom chip as that’s slated for availability in 3Q12, though if TiVo brings such a unit to market I would very much expect the production version to have MoCA to ease integration with the Premiere Elite and to make it more appealing to their cable MSO partners. I’m hoping to have more to say about what TiVo was showing as CES soon.

But don’t expect a UHD sets to be on the market any time soon. For now it will only be used for special events. For example, there are plans to cover some of the 2012 London Olympic Games in UHDTV for display at other venues. If UHD displays do come home, they most likely won’t be for displaying UHD images, but rather for glasses-free 3D. I was fairly dismissive of glasses-free 3D sets in my rant about the current state of the industry a little while back, mainly because of the compromises required for them to work. But the more pixels on the display, and the more pixels per inch, the more ‘sweet spots’ can be created, allowing for a wider viewing angle. That means less need to sit in specific locations relative to the screen to perceive the 3D effect.

Now, you may think that a 7680×4320 display much be huge, but that’s not necessarily the case. It is a factor of pixels per inch. Consider the iPhone’s retina display with 326ppi. At that density a UHD display would be only 24.5×13.25 inches, that’s only a 27 inch display. Now, that’s an extreme example, but it just goes to show that a UHD display can be scaled to different physical sizes using today’s display technology. Of course, it wouldn’t come cheap.

Ignoring the displays, how would you even get a UHD image? 16 times the pixels would mean, worst case, 16 times the data for the same quality image – all else being equal. Now, in the real world it doesn’t quite work that way since neighboring pixels will share data and it isn’t a linear scale, but let’s go with the worst case for now. How would you ever get that much data? You’d be looking at an 800GB Blu-ray, which is far more than even lab versions have hit.

The good news is everything doesn’t have to be equal. The other recent news is that the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC), a cooperative effort between the International Telecommunication Union and Moving Picture Experts Group, is making progress on the standard for High Efficiency Video Coding, aka H.265. This is expected to be the successor to today’s champ, H.264. The first draft is expected to be released in February 2012, with a final standard in January 2013. H.265 takes advantage of the growth in processor capabilities. It is more computationally intensive than H.264, but should provide compression 25% to 50% better. That could mean that an H.265 UHD image would only have eight times the data as an H.264 1080p image. And with real world compression aspects factored in even less. That starts to bring things into the realm of possibility. Back in 2008 Pioneer demonstrated a Blu-ray disc capable of holding 400GB on 16 25GB layers. And BDXL, which is already a commercial product, holds 100GB/128GB on three or four ~33GB layers. And work is underway to push Blu-ray all the way to 1TB. So by the time UHD displays are viable for the home, we’ll probably have a Blu-ray disc capable of holding UHD content. Streaming? Does your ISP offer Gigabit connections?

But H.265 will have a more immediate impact. You don’t have to be encoding UHD to use it. That 25-50% savings applies to all content. And with mobile data plans all heading to tiered pricing, bandwidth caps on home broadband, and the explosion of streaming HD content, every bit helps. Just think, for the same amount of data you could have up to twice the run time. Of course, even once H.265 is finalized it will probably take a year or two for it to make it into silicon and then into new devices. And you will most likely have to buy a new device to use it. Most devices, like set top boxes and smartphones, implement video decoding in dedicated silicon. So you’d need new hardware to support H.265. Powerful PC CPUs and graphics cards might be able to do it with a software update, but otherwise it means a replacement.

UHDTV from Broadcasting & Cable. H.265 news from Multichannel News via Zatz Not Funny.

This video from Chumby illustrates some of the features (there is no sound, FYI):

The NeTV is a very simple little Linux computer with HDMI in, HDMI out, and IR receiver for the remote, power via a microUSB connection (like most phones these days), a setup button, and 802.11g WiFi for connectivity. It looks like it is using microSD for storage, but the slot is not accessible from the outside. There is no Ethernet port, but according to the developer information the microUSB port configures itself as an Ethernet device. Perhaps some kind of Ethernet dongle will be released for those who don’t want to use WiFi. The limitation of 802.11g is disappointing. I’m sure it is a cost-cutting measure, but I’m in the process of trying to eliminate all 11g devices from my home as I’m upgrading to 11n and if I can drop 11g compatibility it will improve performance.

Interestingly the NeTV does not use Flash, as all other Chumby devices have. It is an HTML5 device using a Webkit-based browser. That means that it will not run existing Chumby apps, as they’re all Flash-based. There are some other interesting tidbits in the NeTV forum.

Via Zatz Not Funny.

Solid Signal, recently mentioned for listing the THR22 DirecTiVo, is running the promotion on their site. Details as provided on the site:

How to Get TiVo for Just $9.99 a Month?

To qualify for the $9.99 a month TiVo Service you just need to purchase a TiVo Premiere, and sign up for a 1-year TiVo Service 11-15-11, using the activation code: Antenna
|
**Service Bundle Offer for Antenna Owners: Save 50% off TiVo service (regular price $19.99) when you purchase a TiVo Premiere box for $99.99 and sign up for a new 1-year monthly service subscription commitment to the service at $9.99 per month, plus tax (renews monthly after 1 year at the same rate). Discount on TiVo Service pricing available for antenna customers only. Use of a CableCARD™ decoder will result in your monthly service fee being raised to the standard rate of $19.99/mo plus tax. Early termination fee and terms and conditions apply. See sales associate and tivo.com for complete details. Offer valid for TiVo Service activations on TiVo Premiere boxes through 11/15/11. TiVo reserves the right to terminate this promotion at any time without notice.

What’s not clear is what happens if you use it with analog cable, or clear QAM, without using a CableCARD. The wording of the deal sounds like you need to use a CableCARD to be disqualified, but I think the spirit of the deal is clearly meant to be antenna and no cable in any form.

TiVo is one of the best DVR solutions available to cord cutters as, aside from rolling your own with a PC, there really aren’t many ATSC DVR options available. These days TiVo is really pretty much it, at least for anything that isn’t bare bones, like the Channel Master CM-7000PAL. (It is basically a rebranded version of the discontinued Dish Network DTVPal.) For the price of the Channel Master you can get a TiVo and nearly two years of service at the lower rate, and you get lot more features. And with the OTT services supported by TiVo it is great for the antenna-broadband combo cord cutters.

While the promotion is running on Solid Signal’s page, you enter the code on TiVo’s site when activating service. I suspect you can actually use the promo code with units purchased elsewhere, such as via Amazon for $81.99.

Perhaps a better choice would be BestBuy.com though, as they’re now offering a free long-range antenna with the purchase of a TiVo Premiere. Sold as a bundle, you get the TiVo and antenna for $99.99, the price of the TiVo, saving $105.99. Presuming the ‘Antenna’ promo code does work for units purchased elsewhere you could get a TiVo, antenna, and half-price service – everything a beginning cord cutter needs.

Via Zatz Not Funny.

While there is no confirmation, or refutation, of the July 31st launch date, but his sources indicate pricing for the 32″ 1080p LED HDTV will be $599 and the 42″ 1080p LED HDTV will be $999. Those prices may sound high, but these are LED HTDVs, and for LED models those prices are pretty reasonable. And, if they’re accurate, they’re probably MSRP – and who pays MSRP? Dave also believes he’s found the specs: 1080p, 120Hz LED LCD, dual band 802.11n wireless, 4 HDMI ports, 3 speakers. Not bad.

Shortly after making his post, Dave was contacted by a tipster who provided a number of photos of the 42″ model’s packaging. The photos confirm most of the information, and provide even more. The new branding is ‘TiVo Design’, which seems like TiVo’s version of ‘Intel Inside’. The remote is, unfortunately IMHO, not a TiVo peanut, but looks like a button farm brick.

The TV’s have no DVR, as we knew, just using the TiVo HDUI from the Premiere to access OTT content and for the guide. There will not be a subscription fee to use the service.

But what is really interesting are the included apps. This is a TiVo-powered TV, so you might expect expect services like Photobucket, Pandora, Netflix and YouTube, and they’re there. But so are Twitter, Facebook, Napster, CinemaNow, Insignia OnDemand, and Chumby apps. Best Buy owns Napster & CinemaNow, and of course Insignia, so these aren’t much of a surprise. But what makes these interesting is that the work must have been done to integrate then into the TiVo UI for these HDTVs. And if that work has been done, doesn’t it make sense to leverage it for the standalone TiVo units like the Premiere? We’ve heard mention of Twitter and Facebook apps in conjunction with MSO deals in the past, but this looks like it will be the first public appearance of such apps.

And, to start a rumor:

• TiVo has talked about apps as part of their new platform.
• Chumby’s app development environment is Flash.
• TiVo’s new platform also just happens to use Flash for apps.

Could TiVo jump-start their app library, as well as their developer base, by adopting Chumby’s app environment for their platforms outside of the Insignia TVs? It would certainly give them a shot in the arm. They’d benefit from the established library of apps, and the combined platform would provide a larger user base, which is more appealing to developers.

Certainly something to think about.

Dave Zatz has been having a field day with his Roku 2 coverage: playing Angry Birds, looking at the upcoming channels, the new Netflix app (with 1080p, 5.1 sound, and subtitles), and, of course, his full review.

Note that these TV’s do not include DVRs! They are connected TVs, or cTV’s in Best Buy parlance, which use the TiVo HD UI, introduced on the Premiere, for their functionality. I don’t know if there is any Trojan Horse DVR functionality in there – say via an add-on module (Toshiba and others have sold HDTVs with this kind of sidecar DVR capability in the past), but we’ll see.

We really don’t know too much about the feature set of these TVs at this point. Will they support streaming shows from a TiVo Premiere (or Premiere Elite) in the home? We don’t know, but I hope they do. I guess we won’t have long to find out.

Two models are slated for July 31st – a 32 inch and a 42 inch set. And no TiVo subscription is required! I’m guessing Best Buy is footing the bill for the guide data service. Kind of like TiVo Basic on the old Pioneer and Toshiba TiVo/DVD combo units.

See the Zatz Not Funny post for more, including photos of the Best Buy source materials.

HAVA, from Monsoon Multimedia, is the primary competition to Sling Media’s Slingbox. HAVA has some features not found on Slingboxes – such as supporting multicast on a LAN (multiple, simultaneous clients), officially supporting recording on PCs, working as a tuner within Windows Media Center, learning new IR codes, and more. Additionally, all HAVA Mobile clients are free, unlike SlingPlayer Mobile. However, the HAVA products tend to be less polished than Sling, and little rougher around the edges. While Sling has clients for Windows and Mac OS, and mobile clients for Windows Mobile Standard & Professional, Symbian S60 & UIQ, Palm OS, and BlackBerry, HAVA Player is available only for Windows, Windows Mobile Standard & Professional, Symbian S60, and Maemo (the Linux flavor on Nokia N810 Internet tablets).

Sling has submitted their iPhone client to Apple, while HAVA demo’d an early version of their iPhone client at CES, so they’ll hopefully be submitting that soon. HAVA is also apparently developing a client for Mac OS. So as long as you have a supported platform, it could work fine for you.

Good luck!

You know, if HAVA really wants to compete with Sling, they should probably go after markets where Sling isn’t yet – like Android and Linux desktops. And since all HAVA boxes stream in MPEG-2 and MPEG-4/H.264, while Slingboxes stream in WMV/VC-1 (except the PRO-HD which also supports MPEG-2 and MPEG-4/H.264), and Flash video supports H.264, they might be able to put out a Flash-based client. A Flash client would be a killer app. Release a reference implementation and open-source it – widespread client availability would sell hardware.

Also, since they give away their clients for free, unlike Sling, they’d have nothing to lose by getting HAVA Player built into things like Boxee, VLC, the Roku Digital video Player, etc. Maybe even TiVo – since Sling Media parent EchoStar and TiVo are still slugging it out in court, and EchoStar is adding placeshifting to DISH DVRs and cable boxes, TiVo could use HAVA to respond.

But that’s a tangent and maybe I should just do a whole post on my thoughts on the placeshifting market.

Unrelated, sorry I haven’t been posting. I thought I’d be jumping back in when I posted a few weeks ago, but I underestimated just how draining the job hunting process can be. The good news is I’ve accepted an offer and should be back to work soon. The only downside is that the job is in Somerville, MA, and I live in Worcester, MA, so I’ll have a commute of about an hour each way. But I’ll be working 3rd shift, so traffic shouldn’t be bad, and I’m happy about the job itself.

The version number is 11.0-01-2-648 on my S3. This update includes the changes seen in the 9.3.2 update that hit Series2 systems recently. Aside from those changes I don’t see any other differences. I looked through all the menus but nothing seemed different to me. I’m sure there are under-the-covers changes to warrant a major revision number jump. I’m guessing WMV/VC-1 decoding is in there for Netflix streaming support. And maybe some other surprises.

This service update reorganizes some of the TiVo Central menu choices, specifically adding a menu item for Video on Demand content from TiVo and it’s partners. If your DVR is connected to broadband, you’ll be able to enjoy the latest movies, television shows, and web videos directly from this menu. You’ll also find a new way to start Swivel Search anytime you pause a program!

Zatz Not Funny has several screencaps of the new interface. The Showcases item has been pushed off of TiVo Central, and is now a sub-item on the Music, Photos, & Showcases screen, renamed from Music, Photos, Products, & More. This has freed up a slot for a new Video on Demand menu item, which slots in just below the renamed Find Programs (no longer Find Programs & Downloads, thanks to the new item).

And now when you pause a program you may see ‘Press UP to show extras‘. When you so, you are presented with the option to find out more about the program, which links to Swivel Search. I expect that the extras could expand in the future to include other items, such as Amazon shopping for items related to the program, maybe links to bonus content, etc. EDIT: Correction – I was corrected in the comments, when you pause a program you see the Swivel Search link and can hide it by pressing ‘Down’, pressing ‘Up’ brings it back.

Like Dave, I’m sure we’ll see these new features added to the Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL as well. Likely in a 9.4.x release in the coming weeks. TiVo traditionally has a fall update, and it is about that time. Although, unlike Dave, I’m not that surprised to see the S2 boxes getting an update. While the future is clearly with the HD units, with their newer hardware capable of things the S2 simply cannot do, the units still have a great deal in common with a shared core architecture. So it should be easier for TiVo to continue supporting the S2 than it was with the S1, which had a different architecture. Not to mention the sheer numbers of Series2 units in the field, much larger than the total number of S1 units sold. I think TiVo will continue to provide at least basic updates for the S2 platform for a while just to keep those users active.

I’d still like to see this expanded to cover local places. I checked it out as well, but the two Domino’s locations it offered me were pick-up only, I’m outside their delivery area. There used to be one a block and a half from my house, but I noticed just a week ago as I drove by that it was gone. So I guess I won’t be trying it out myself.

That aside, the application was fairly simple to use, and I can see this being useful. If it supported places I actually ordered from I think I’d use TiVo-based ordering. I host a regular movie night with friends at my place, and we always order dinner. Right now we do it by passing around take-out menus and I write down what people want, then I call in the order, or sometimes order online from my laptop – if the place supports it. But if people could just put in what they want on the TV screen, we could all see the order, and then place it – that’d really be convenient.

1) Death of the Moxi
This one’s just as much a rumor as the Launch of the BMC 3012
However here we are, with systems announcing year end lock downs etc and still no official hint of the 3012. As such I’m pretty much guessing it’s never left internal beta in St. Louis. Furthermore comments made from management recently here (SC/NC/VA group) indicate Moxi *WILL* be eventually phased out.

However at the same time, apparently we are apparently getting BMC9012s THROWN at us as no other MSO appears to be taking them. So for now the BMC9012 is alive and strong… I don’t forsee them closing up shop in markets with Moxi for quite a while (given we can’t get enough 6416s in to meet demand).

That being said, my “insider’s guess” at what’s going to happen next -
I predict no NEW MSO based Moxi boxes, but I also predict that Moxi will remain availible for at least 2 more years.

Hopefully DIGEO will get on the ball with the CableCard enabled boxes for retail, because from what I’ve seen, it seems like Charter was the last major MSO to hang on…

Thanks to Dave Zatz of Zatz Not Funny for the tip off.

Netflix streaming is coming to TiVo – very soon. It is great news, but it isn’t too surprising. TiVo and Netflix first talked about partnering over four years ago, though that initial deal seemed to fizzle when Netflix had trouble getting content rights.

In the meantime the market has completely changed. Netflix has rolled out their streaming service and TiVo has added streaming support to their platform for YouTube. And, of course, movie downloads from Amazon and Jaman, with CinemaNow/Disney expected any day now. Content providers are much more open to digital distribution than they were four years ago, and the technology has improved as well. A lot of us have been expecting TiVo and Netflix to bring streaming to TiVo. Especially after Netflix made deals with LG and Samsung to stream to some their Blu-ray players.

This now gives TiVo content from four major services – Amazon, Jaman, CinemaNow (soon), and Netflix. The only major service left that I can think of is Blockbuster/Movielink. And, honestly, they’re not exactly the market leader. I suppose TiVo could work with VUDU to build a VUDU client into TiVo, but with all the other content I don’t know that it would be worth it for TiVo. More benefit for VUDU I’d think. The only thing left to make TiVo *the* platform for movies is HD content, and I’m sure that’s coming.

As Amazon VOD also offers streaming, I expect TiVo to bring that to their platform in addition to the downloads available today. And we’re all just waiting for HD content. There have been repeated hints and mentions of work toward bringing HD content downloads from Amazon to TiVo, and more recently Jaman and Cinema now. And just today Netflix announced they’ll be streaming in HD to Xbox 360. So maybe we’ll see Netflix in HD on TiVo as well.

What’s next for TiVo and broadband content? I think we’ll see them making deals with more content portal sites and networks, like Hulu.com and CBS.com. It is just logical, and TiVo already has the infrastructure to support such streaming sites. I think TiVo is making the right moves.

The Netflix streaming, like YouTube, will be coming to the TiVo Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL. It isn’t clear if they’ll be using H.264, like YouTube, or if the streams will be using VC-1 – which Netflix uses for their PC and Mac streaming. The TiVo hardware is capable of supporting both codecs, but VC-1 hasn’t been used to date. Why no Series2 support? As with YouTube, the hardware doesn’t support the newer codecs.

Picked up from Zatz Not Funny.

The press release:

TIVO AND NETFLIX ANNOUNCE PARTNERSHIP TO INSTANTLY STREAM MOVIES AND TV EPISODES FROM NETFLIX DIRECTLY TO THE TV THROUGH TIVO DVRs

Deal Provides Netflix with New Content Distribution Channel, Solidifies TiVo’s Leading Position as One-Box Solution for Simple Navigation and Delivery Of the Best Entertainment Content to the TV

ALVISO, Calif. and LOS GATOS, Calif., October 30, 2008 — TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders (DVRs) and Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX), the world’s largest online movie rental service, today announced that they are teaming up to provide Netflix and TiVo® Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL subscribers with the ability to have thousands of movies and TV episodes instantly streamed from Netflix directly to their TVs.

The two companies said they are initiating a test of the new capability today in several thousand U.S. households and expect it to be broadly available in early December, in time for the holidays. The ability to instantly watch content from Netflix on the TV via TiVo DVRs will be offered at no additional charge to customers who subscribe to both services.

The agreement provides Netflix with an important new technology partner to instantly stream a growing library of more than 12,000 choices of movies and TV episodes directly from Netflix to the TV. It also solidifies TiVo’s leading position for simple navigation and delivery of the best entertainment content to the TV.

“For Netflix and TiVo subscribers, this collaboration offers a fabulously easy way to enhance the enjoyment of watching movies in the comfort of their living rooms,” said Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO of Netflix. “Subscribers to Netflix and TiVo are avid movie watchers and this combination gives them immediate access to all of the great content available through TiVo and the thousands of additional choices available to be streamed instantly from Netflix.”

“Joining forces with Netflix creates the ultimate video on demand service and solidifies TiVo’s leading position as the one-box solution for aggregating, searching, and delivering the best content available anywhere right to the TV,” said Tom Rogers, president and CEO of TiVo Inc. “Adding Netflix to our already vast library of content differentiates TiVo even further from any other offering in the market today.”

Integrating the Netflix streaming functionality into the TiVo experience will result in quick and easy access to a growing list of movies and TV episodes that can be watched instantly at Netflix. Movies streamed from Netflix via specified TiVo DVRs is done through a wired or wireless broadband connection and a Netflix Queue-based user interface. Members visit the Netflix Web site to add movies and TV episodes to their individual instant Queues. Those choices will automatically be displayed on subscribers’ TVs and available to watch instantly through the TiVo service. With the TiVo remote control, users will be able to browse their instant Queue, make selections right on the TV screen, and also have the ability to read synopses and rate movies. In addition, they will have the option of pausing, fast-forwarding, rewinding and re-starting whenever they wish.

For more information on how to have movies instantly streamed from Netflix via your TiVo DVR visit www.tivo.com/netflix.

We are rolling out TiVo beyond the Boston market test, where things are going quite well and we are going to be introducing other cities, probably starting with Chicago in the first quarter next year

This isn’t too surprising as Chicago is one of two cities where Comcast has rolled out tru2way support (the other being Denver – maybe they’ll be next?), and, as Light Reading’s Cable Digital News points out, it is another territory where Comcast uses Motorola hardware. Still no word on when Comcast and TiVo will complete the work to being the software to Cisco/Scientific Atlanta DVRs.

Comcast is also running a new TV spot to advertise the TiVo software:

EDIT: And more coverage:
The Gadgetress
Engadget
EngadgetHD
jkOnTheRun
Gizmodo
Obsessable
TG Daily
TWICE
Silicon Alley Insider
TVPredictions
TechSpot
SlashGear
Multichannel News
ZDNet – The Mobile Gadgeteer
TheStreet.com
Electronista
Electronic House
Boy Genius Report
eHomeUpgrade
ZDNet – The Toybox
Obsessable – Product Page

Disclaimer: I’m employed by Sling Media and HAVA is considered a competitor.

By the time I purchased my first TiVo in February of 2002, TiVo Takes was already defunct, just something users would talk about wistfully. But for its time it was an interesting foray into interactive television. I think the user base, which considering they’d only launched in 1999 was quite small, wasn’t large enough to sustain such efforts. Though TiVoShanan has done a few in-house long-form videos for TiVo promotions. I remember some from couple of years ago where she went behind the scenes on some shows, I don’t remember if that was given a unique title though.

Well, a lot has changed in the past eight years, not the least of which is the rise of online video. And now TiVo is taking another stab at generating content, launching The Badoop Badoop Show on YouTube. The channel blurb:

Since its inception, the Emmy® award-winning TiVo service has changed the way millions of people watch TV. And coming soon: the “The Badoop Badoop Show,” a quirky show to keep you in the entertainment know with TiVo recommendations every week on what to watch, hear, download and more. This is not your average entertainment news show. And yes! The show is named after one of TiVo’s unmistakable soundmarks: Badoop-Badoop! Subscribe now for the PREMIERE of Badoop coming next week!

Right now there is one video posted, which is the promo video for the launch of YouTube on the TiVo Series3/HD. Having this on YouTube is great, and clearly a way to stealth market. But while watching it via YouTube on TiVo would be very meta indeed, I hope they offer the content up as a TiVoCast channel as well. I’m busy and lazy, I love it when content comes to me – be it TiVoCast, RSS, or what have you. Speaking of RSS, here’s the feed for the YouTube channel.

Thanks to Dave Zatz of Zatz Not Funny for the heads-up.

Dave Zatz over at Zatz Not Funny posted a few screen shots of the interface, which confirm what I suspected – there is a PIN to control access to purchase power. It uses the same PIN required for Amazon Unbox purchases, which certainly makes sense. The product screen looks much like a program description screen, and there is Swivel Search-like functionality with ‘View related products’. Shipping and taxes are calculated (I’m presuming it takes into account things like Amazon Prime) and you have the ability to confirm the order with the total to be charged. Or you can change your shipping options, or even save the item to your Amazon web-based shopping cart.

EDIT: I’d requested images of the interface as well, and TiVo got back to me with them today:

Wired’s Epicenter blog’s coverage helps clarify a few things about the implementation. The current implementation will display the product purchase option on the delete screen at the end of a program, similar to the ads that can display there today. While programs can be flagged for specific products, TiVo can also use a Suggestions-style system where it presents products it feels are related, based on the program’s guide data. So the name of a talk show guest may cause books by that person to be offered, etc.

Product Purchase will also be available through Universal Swivel Search, where products related to the search results may be presented for purchase. So if you’re searching for David Hasselhoff you may be offered DVDs of Knight Rider, for example. And there’s more:

It’s not an exclusive arrangement, though, and it’s fair to expect both Amazon.com and TiVo will hop in bed with other players. “We’re always looking at ways to expand shopping options for customers,” says Heather Huntoon, a spokeswoman from Amazon.com.

TiVo’s [Evan Young, Director of Broadband Services] says the company may introduce other commerce partners, but at the moment the focus is on Amazon. “We’re looking to create some initial success with Amazon. They’re already a partner of ours, and they have excellent customer service.”

And although TiVo hasn’t tested the shopping service yet, Young is already hopeful that the initiative can be expanded to include in-program product placements and other ad arrangements.

“We’re interested in talking to programmers as well as advertisers to enable more impulse buys when it make sense,” says Young.

So TiVo could partner with QVC to offer remote-based ordering without the need to call in. Or perhaps partner with a national pizza chain to allow ordering from the TiVo, with prompts to do so in their ads. (Actually, thinking about it, there are websites out there that offer menus for local delivery joints, and sometimes online ordering. TiVo should link up with one (or more) of them and get an HME based ordering system up. It would make compiling an order for all your friends so much easier.) Channels that sell DVDs of their own programs, like Discovery and History, could sell them right at the end of the program, direct to viewers via TiVo. MTV could offer CD sales, or perhaps downloads, linked from videos (Well, whenever they deign to show videos these says.) I can think of many possible uses for this feature.

The hard part would be that, with the current system, you need to have a relationship with the vendor so that they have your payment information on file. If TiVo were to act as a payment broker, or partner with the likes of PayPal to be a broker, they could sign up just about any merchant without the user having to establish those payment relationships. That would really reduce the friction in the system.

TiVo’s Stephen Mack also posted some details on the new feature over at TiVoCommunity:

With that out of the way, here’s what you’ll see with the new feature launching today.

* For Burn Notice, Oprah’s Book Club, and a few other shows, at the conclusion of the show you’ll see a message in the delete dialog box allowing you to purchase related products. (These are similar to existing messages in the delete dialog box.) More shows will come in the future.
* In the future, we’ll create a showcase for upcoming talk shows allowing you to purchase related products.
* In the future, we’ll create a showcase about newly released books, DVDs and CDs.

The second and third items you’ll see next week, and if they’re well received we’ll evaluating continuing with them.

I’m very excited about this new feature — it’s long been high on my wishlist of things that I want when I watch TV, and I’m glad we’ve released this new feature for our customers.

Furthermore, he added:

One other point: Think of this an add-on to the existing advertising delivery methods that we’ve had for a while. Product purchase further enhances things like Showcases, program placement (that’s what we call the related menu items in the delete dialog box), and the Thumbs Up tags on advertisements.

This will be no more invasive than the existing advertising products that you’ve seen already. We don’t intend to put this new feature in any new locations.

In case it isn’t clear, that mean no ‘Buy Now’ pop-ups during actual program content. But they may appear over ads, just as the ‘Press Thumbs Up For More Information’ prompts can do so today. So those who have been worried about big pop-ups in the middle of their favorite show needed be concerned. (Though, personally, as I said in my early post, I think some kind of small, unobtrusive indicator to be able to order in-content items would be cool. But I know some would dislike that, so it should probably be something the user can disable.)

And, finally, TiVo did issue an official press release today announcing the feature.

9.4 enables native H.264 decoding on the S3 & HD, required for YouTube support. What is not known is if there decoding support has been extended to other areas as well, such as video podcasts. If so, it could eliminate transcoding on a PC via TiVo Web Video, at least for video podcasts in H.264 – which is many, if not most, of them. I’m hoping the H.264 support does apply to other video sources, it would make life much easier. TiVo Web Video is OK, but not ideal.

Speaking of, allow me a small digression…

I realize I never did pull together a review of TiVo Desktop 2.6 as I’d said I would. I’ve been pretty busy and it got away from me. And, honestly, I’ve had so many problems with it that each time I think about writing it up I just get upset again. I recently had TiVo Web Video forget all of the podcasts I’d subscribed to, twice in two days! I noticed it wasn’t transferring anything after a couple of days, and when I checked the config file it was back to default – all the subscriptions gone. So I restored them and it started transferring again, so I went to bed. The next day it had stopped, and the file was wiped out, again! I wiped everything and started from scratch and it has been working for over a week now. And this isn’t the first time this happened, early on it lost all the subscriptions too. Of course, since TiVo Web Video, unlike TiVoCast, doesn’t just start with the most recent recording and move forward, but insists on downloading and transcoding back episodes as well (default is 5), it would re-download and re-transfer everything. It literally takes a few days for my PC to suck down all the backlog (I subscribe to a number of podcasts) and transfer it. So when this happens it is a major pain in the posterior.

And it doesn’t clean up after itself, I found over ten gigabytes of abandoned downloaded recordings sitting the the Downloads directory. Recordings it should’ve deleted after transferring to the TiVo. It just slowly uses up the drive. The leaking seems to vary – right now there are two files from back on 7/8 totally about 50MB. But all it takes is a few long-form HD podcasts to be missed and it adds up fast. Those are just a couple of the problems with it. Don’t get me wrong, having it is better than not having it at all, but it is far from a stable solution, let alone ideal. But I digress, I really should make myself write up all the issues and such.

Back to the topic at hand..,

So anyway, I would really love to see TiVo allow the S3/HD to download H.264 podcasts directly, bypassing the PC. Heck, as an interim even if they downloaded to the PC but skipped transcoding and just transferred to the TiVo as-is it would speed things up a great deal. Transcoding really slows things down.

Dave got a look at what is apparently a pre-release version of the software, so the final release could vary, but probably won’t. YouTube is added as another option under the TiVo Central -> Find Programs & Downloads -> Download TV, Movies, & Web Video menu item. It looks like the screen has been retitled from ‘Video Downloads’ to ‘Broadband Video’, which may be a reflection of the fact that TiVo is now streaming video and not just downloading it. The ‘Movies & TiVo from Amazon Unbox’ link has been changed to ‘Amazon Unbox TV & Movies’, which I think sounds better. And just below that, slotting in above ‘Brows Other Videos’ is a new link entitled, simply, ‘YouTube’.

The only sub-option at this time is ‘Watch YouTube Videos’, and once you select that you get into the YouTube HME application interface proper. The color scheme reminds me of the current Music Choice application. Within the application you can select Featured Videos, Most Recent, Search, Top Favorites, Most Viewed, or Top Rated. Each selection then has sub-selections. The interface looks pretty good, and you can even rate the videos 1-5 stars, just as you can online.

From Dave’s video I don’t see a way to link this application with your YouTube account, which would be nice. I’d like to be able to pull up the subscriptions I have on YouTube from my TiVo. And to have ratings from one location be reflected in the other. Being able to subscribe or favorite a video on the TiVo and having it show up online would be nice. But this is the first release, and from what I can see it looks good. This could always be a future enhancement.

UPDATE: Shortly after I posted this I was looking over some other blogs and over at Gizmodo I saw that TiVo will indeed be adding the ability to login to your YouTube account, in an update due eight weeks out.

Dave also tacked a quick look at the Tuning Adapter and Network Remote Control screens at the end of the video. He says we can expect the official press release later today, and the application may start showing up on TiVos with 9.4 as early as today (Thursday) as well. TiVo has a new page on their site as well: http://www.tivo.com/youtube

Now that TiVo has support for H.264 and streaming video, I’m hopeful we’ll see more features using them. Aside from the aforementioned video podcast support, TiVo could support Amazon’s upcoming video streaming service, HD video downloads (most HD downloads use H.264), perhaps even streaming video between TiVo units, or from a PC to a TiVo.

I’m still waiting to receive 9.4 myself, can’t wait to play with this.

(And no Dave, you’re not the only one still waiting for Tekzilla. )

And I’m sure there others that I haven’t spotted.

Dave Zatz posted this video to YouTube:

Note that this is a proof of concept, a technology demonstrator, and not the SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone that will eventually be released. This was an engineering project written for jail-broken iPhones to characterize the performance of the platform and ensure that Sling could deliver a high quality customer experience on the iPhone & iPod Touch platforms. This allowed Sling to gain experience with the platform while waiting for the SDK to be released. The official SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone will be written using the SDK and sold through the iTunes App store like other official iPhone/iPod Touch applications. At least that is currently the intent.

If you’re attending the Apple WWDC this week you can get a look at the proof of concept application first hand. Sling Media Product Manager Vicky Shum will be at the Starbucks at 120 4th Street, San Francisco (across from the Metreon) between 10:00 and 16:00 (10am and 4pm) on Monday, June 9th running demos.

Disclaimer: I am currently employed by Sling Media.

Picked up from Zatz Not Funny.

Disclaimer: I am currently employed by Sling Media, for whom HAVA is the leading competitor.