Engadget has an interesting article discussing two new services for downloading television shows over Internet. The first is TVTonic.com which is a free service for downloading various television broadcasts including movietrailers and news clips.
Homechoice, available in Great Britain, sounds like an interesting service. When you sign up for their service, they’ll pipe 80 television channels over your phone line, a high speed internet service, and access to some television content like music videos. The trick for getting all this data downloaded over copper is that they only send down the television channel that you are currently viewing (as opposed to sending all the channels down the pipe like cable). Still, subscribers need a 2Mbit connection to make it all work.
Conexant announced a new HDTV decoder developed for set-top boxes. It also includes PVR features including this blurb:
PVR functionality is fully supported enabling end-users to simultaneously watch and record up to four separate programs, or record a program while watching up to two live or previously recorded programs.
Sounds pretty cool.
I’ve been reading through the Tivo RewardsTM Terms and Conditions, and while you can’t share referral points, I don’t see anything against the program that prevents us from pooling referrals and giving away the prizes through some form of random drawing. Unless I hear from Tivo, here is the TVHarmony Tivo Rewards Prize Pool:
(more…)
CarAudioMag.com shows you how to put a Playstation 2 in your car.
I’d be really nervous having this guy behind me during my commute.
(Hat Tip: Engadget)
Anandtech.com has a great review of Microsoft’s Portable Media Center technology and it’s first licensed product, Creative’s Zen Player. It goes into quite a bit of detail and adds some caveats for people who are interested in getting one.
The main issue mentioned is that you are required to use Windows Media Player 10 to manage and synchronize your content. That’s good since it means that it will transcode any video (as long as you download the codec) from their original format to something that can be read by the player so that eliminates the worries of incompatible video formats. That’s bad if you don’t like WMP 10 and prefer an alternative multimedia manager.
I’m going to wait to see what the open source community does with this device. If they find a way to hack it to use with other software products, I’ll be more interested. It would also be nice to hack it and install a much larger hard drive, considering how cheap they are these days.
NPD, a leading market research firm, released a press release reporting market numbers for Video On Demand services. Picking through the public data:
- 0.3% of videos purchased or rented came from VOD sites.
- MovieLink is the leader in this emerging market with 33% of sales, followed by MovieFlix
- 80% of consumers are male
- Half the consumers were under 35
- Leading title downloaded this quarter: Independence Day
(more…)
I’m not much of gamer these days, but Engadget has me revved up about the upcoming Playstation Portable. According to Sony’s press release, the new Playstation Portable could be an interesting product for people on the go.
(more…)
Last quarter, Tivo set their goal to have 3 million subscribers by January. It looks like they are making good progress with this announcement that they now have 2 million Tivo users.
On a related note, they also issued this press release. It states that Tivo just hired a new guy to head their Marketing Dept, Matt Wisk. He came from nutritional supplement mega-company HerbaLife.
I hope he’s able to help turn the boat around for Tivo. It’s clear they need to grow their marketshare to stay solvent, so hopefully this will help. I’m surprised they started a new marketing campaign before they hired someone to run it (as opposed to hire a new marketing guy and have him create the new campaign), but perhaps the timing of things dictated which came first.
Good news for Tivo, that’s for sure.
According to Mac Observer, if you persuade enough of your friends to buy Tivo, you can earn yourself a special Tivo “branded” IPod.
That would make quite a fashion statement for the uber-geek like myself.
Having been a Tivo user for over a year now, I’ve got a lot of pent up ideas for ways Tivo (and likely other PVRs) could improve their service. As an ongoing column, I’ll occasionally add my own ideas to the mix.
As a starting point, I’ll point you to Kottke.org’s excellent article, “Suggestions for Tivo” which also offers some reasonable features to add.
(more…)
