NBC tries to outsmart TiVo

NBC has scheduled the final broadcast of Friends to start tonight at 8.59 p.m. Why? To beat TiVo recording, obviously. I'm not sure if they don't want us to watch the penultimate episode of Survivor: All-Stars (confession: I'm addicted). But it's clear that starting it a minute early is intended to disrupt digital recording of shows that run 8:00 to 9:00 p.m. The fix is simple. On my ReplayTV, I just set a manual record from 9:00 to 10:00 for NBC (or I could set an 8:00 to 8:59 Survivors recording). But it's clear that this is a direct DVR pushback. But how does this help the network? I link to a post about Fear Factor in which the thread explores on a discussion board why Fear Factor was getting chopped or not recording.

Who will buy Tivo for scrap?

OK, I have to admit it. Tivo's goose is cooked. I've been a Tivo user for years, and like most Tivo owners, I absolutely love the product. I've been convinced since I first plugged it in that some day, all TV would work like this. And I'm still convinced of that. Television as a fixed schedule grid determined by networks and cable operators is doomed. User control is the future of TV.

Unfortunately, Tivo the company hasn't done as well as Tivo the idea, or Tivo the product design. The latest bad news is that Marty Yudkovitz, the ABC veteran brought in as President, is resigning. This after Mike Ramsay announced he would step down as CEO. Maybe someone else will come in and pull off a miraculous turnaround, but it seems unlikely. Cable operators and companies like Microsoft are launching their own digital recorders (DVRs), limiting Tivo's growth prospects.

Tivo, though, still has two big assets. I'm reasonably confident those assets will be valuable enough for one of the major industry players to purchase, or perhaps a consortium. The assets are Tivo's brand, and its patents.

Like Google, Tivo has reached "verb" status as a technology brand. People talk about "Tivoing" programs, because they associate the name with the whole concept of DVRs. That's worth a lot, even to a company that plans to scrap Tivo's actual technology. Just ask the good folks at Roxio, er, Napster.

Perhaps even more significant, though, is Tivo's intellectual property. I don't know exactly what patents Tivo holds, but it has a significant portfolio of assets, because it has been in the game so long and innovated in so many areas. Big interests that want to compete in the video space -- and that, today, means some very big interests -- won't want to be on the other side of those patents. We saw a similar story recently with Intertrust, which held key digital rights management patents that led to an acquisition by Sony and Philips.

Tivo Desktop 1.6

The Tivo Effect

How big is something when it gets an "effect"? And what about when no one can decide what that "effect" is?

I'd been hearing about "The Tivo Effect" for a while, and I figured it'd make a good post, so I went looking for a definition. I found this article, this one, this one, this one, and dozens of others, all claiming something different about "The Tivo Effect."

As near as I can tell, it could mean:

• the tendency for advertisers to increase product placement within TV shows (since actual ads can now be skipped)
• the echo created by two TVs in the house watching the same show while one of them is "time-shifted" because of Tivo's ability to pause live TV.
• the inability to go back to life before Tivo
• the increased spare time you have now that you can reduce your TV watching into concentrated blocks of time
• the decreased spare time you have now that you record and watch shows you might never have recorded before

So I still have no idea what The Tivo Effect is, but what's important is that Tivo has affected television viewing to the point where it has a "named effect." And evidently so many of these effects that no one can agree what the most important one is. Do you have a definition for "The Tivo Effect?"

Someday there will be a "Gadgetopia Effect." When that day comes, someone please tell me what it is.

Dear TiVo,

Tivo VLC modules

Tivo To Go Unleashed!

zatznotfunny.com/ttg.htm#psp
track this site | 4 links

tivo my life please......

Tivo as digital hub?

TiVo Pop-Up Ads Are Huge

I had thought, perhaps, that the TiVo users were getting a bit worked up over the TiVo pop-up ads that are in testing, because last I heard they only take up a quarter of the screen. Matt Haughey took this picture of it in action, though, and now I get the ire. That's really annoying, even if it is only when fast-forwarding. How are you supposed to see what you're forwarding through? Even if you can hit 'clear' to make it go away, it's still needlessly messy. Matt has a mock-up of what he'd like to see on PVRBlog and it's much more reasonable.

Maybe that's TiVo's tack—make the first versions so over-the-top that by the time the intro the real deal, everyone will have forgotten how frustrating it is to get pop-up ads on a subscription service in the first place.

"Icon" ads over commercials at TiVo [PVRBlog]

New TiVo jargon

# Passkilling is when someone cancels a Tivo request to change channels and record a Season Pass show.
# A Passkiller is someone who cancels an in-progress Season Pass recording or cancels a channel change request.

TiVo gets mobile

Netflix + Tivo = Yum

New TiVo recorders on th

TiVo filed with the FCC

Get Started With TiVo

TiVo Turns It Up

Saving TiVo

I'm quoted in this Kin Girard article in this mnth's issue of Business 2.0. Only problem is - you can't see the entire article unless your subscribe.

Oh well.

Anyway - here's the opener to the article.

It's been written off by the experts. But thanks to a Silicon Valley software legend, the company that invented digital video recording says it's about to change the way we watch TV -- again.

By Kim Girard, September 01, 2004

Obituaries for the nearly departed TiVo Inc. (TIVO) have been written up for months now, all ready to go when the sad day comes.

They're poignant, these eulogies. There's the part about how feisty little TiVo created a beloved and revolutionary product -- the digital video recorder -- on a shoestring. The word TiVo, like Google and Xerox (XRX) and only a handful of other product names, went on to be used to describe what the gadget does -- in this case, learning what you like to watch, recording similar stuff for later viewing, and allowing you to pause or otherwise time-shift live action. TiVo promised to transform television, advertising -- hell, the culture itself, not least by sparing humanity from having to sit through commercials. Alas, it burned through $567 million between 1999 and mid-2004, and was run down by huge and ruthless competitors that mimicked its technology. But take heart, the eulogists conclude: TiVo will always be with us -- as a verb, if not a company.

There's at least one problem with that scenario, however. His name is Arthur van Hoff. He's an obscure but revered high priest of software coding. And he thinks he's devised a way to pull TiVo back from death's door.

[Business 2.0]

Here's my quote:

" 'Strangeberry works and it's totally cool', says Marc Canter, co- founder of Web media tool maker Macromedia, who was given an early view of the technology."

It does. I am. Here comes TiVO - again.

The only question remains - is it pronounced TeeeeeeVOH or TehVoh. Inquiring minds wanna know.

Netflix + TiVo: Done

MP3 Request: "Tivo, My Tivo"