Thursday, January 19, 2006

Two Great Things, May They Work Great Together

I've mentioned how much Tivo has affected my life in the past. I'm a media junkie. Some people believe there are too many channels and not enough to watch, I say there is a lot to watch but just not enough time to watch it. I've also mentioned my new friend the video iPod. Well, now just like someone dipping their chocolate in someone else's peanut butter, the two great products now will be working together. Tivo has announced that their Tivo to Go program (which allowed you to take a program that you recorded on your Tivo Series 2 machine and send it to your computer) will now allow a new as-yet-unnamed program to compress that into a video that is playable on your iPod. Why pay $1.99 to download a program if you have already recorded it on your Tivo? That's CD and DVD money they are taking from me.

There are some skeptics to this idea. They believe that the people that own the Tivo Series 2 to be a very small market and that this only devalues Tivo. I believe this shows that Tivo is trying to expand its connectivity and make it easier for you to see and or take your entertainment where you need it. One of the biggest sales markets of Tivo was the deal they had with DirecTV, which is still ongoing but DirecTV did come up with their own DVR that they want to get out there. So, the best way to counteract copycats in the marketplace is to create a better product and hope to make it profitable is expand upon what it can do. You allow it to enter areas of the market that others aren't touching and can't touch without getting more expensive.

Previously, Tivo used their Tivo to Go manager to allow someone using DVD burning software to allow you to take DVDs of your television programs with you. I had issues with it as it had codec issues (video and audio formatting.) If you have other codecs installed on your system, it fails. There are tons of codecs out there: DIVX, FFDShow, MPEG-4 video, QuickTime, Matroska, OGG, AVI... too many to really continue listing. One has to be installed to play each of these. I'm not willing to disable my computer to enable my DVD burner let alone my iPod. It just isn't going to happen. So it should be interesting. Here's hoping that they found a way around this issue because I'll be taking my shows with me to work to watch during my lunch hour.

5 comments:

Beth said...

Oh my God. Life will never be the same again.

LoraLoo said...

I haven't even tried the video podcasts yet - and I'm not sure why. Either I'm afraid I'm going to get addicted to more things I don't have time to watch, or I'm afraid I'm going to be disappointed. I've actually browsed through them and it's a very good idea, I'd like to see more programming available. Paying for a show I can tape with my DVR, not attractive; so Tivo may be on to something!

I'm not sure watching anything on that small a screen is going to work for me long term. I do, however, love that technology will allow me to do so, should I choose to!!

David Amulet said...

I can't get excited enough about any television to find clever ways to watch it during a lunch hour. But I can see th evalue of this for schools--Tivo a History Channel or Discovery Channel show and load it to all the students' iPods. Probably will be standard in a few years.

-- david

RT said...

Alright, now that would probably overwhelm me, lol.

Unknown said...

Well Mart you gotta be in hog heaven (just where is hog heaven by the way) now that your electronic toys will be playing with each other...