One of TivoBlog.com’s bloggers laments the need to delete his favorite shows because he’s running out of space and asks for a way out? From the comments to the post, most suggest hacking the Tivo in one fashion or another since there is no standard way of backing up shows unless you have a model with DVD Recording capablity (or purchase Sonic’s MyDVD which can burn DVD’s of Tivo2Go files). There should be an easier way.

One of my many frustrations with Tivo2go is that it is uni-directional. Uploading files back to the Tivo isn’t exactly rocket science as Tivo hackers can attest, and by having the Tivo verify the Tivo2go encryption before uploading, Tivo can ensure that people aren’t uploading pirated files. That certainly would help TivoBlog solve his problem.

If that doesn’t float Tivo’s boat, why not offer an external USB hard drive as an upgrade while coincidentally, create an additional revenue opportunity for Tivo? Those USB ports are just sitting there waiting for something to be plugged into them (besides a network card), and with a few hardware tweaks, they could create a proprietary standard preventing users from using a standard external USB drive.

Via the ubiquitous Thomas Hawk, Bill Gates mentioned that they’ve shipped over 2 Million copies of MCE. That’s becoming a a sizeable market niche for developers.

If you use Tivo2Go to download your shows on to a PC and want them burned on to a DVD, Sonic’s MyDVD is the only solution that has been licensed to do so. Sonic has a 15 day trial that can be freely downloaded. That’s a smart move by Sonic to get people hooked on the functionality.

TivoBlog has some early impressions and a minor misstep during install, but plans to do a full review in the upcoming days. We’ll be doing a review as soon as we’ve cleared our plate of of other “in progress” reviews that have been building up at our TVHarmony underground testing facilities.

It looks like we’ve managed to move the website and recover all our old data. If you run into any problems or find the site slower than before, please send us an email so we can correct the problem.

We still have some work to do on the product tracker but we’re completely revamping it to support xml and other goodies, so for the time being it has been removed from the site. It should go back up in the near future when we have time to complete the changes.

Thanks again for your continued patience and support.

Thomas Hawk has some insightful criticism of my post yesterday where I suggested Microsoft should give MCE away as a free download. It’s well worth reading all of Thomas Hawk’s comments, but his main contention is that Microsoft would balk at giving it away. Here’s the gist:

With regards to giving the software away, although this would be quite exciting, I don’t think that Microsoft would go for it. Microsoft LOVES XP and Office. These are cash cows at the company. Despite what they may say, they HATE IE and WMP. IE and WMP were built out of desperation. These were defensive products primarily designed to help lock down the cash cows that are XP and Office. LOVES and HATE are too harsh of words of course but I’m using them here for sensationalistic effect to make a point.

Gates sees the tv thing as really really big. He’s put a lot of his own time and energy into pushing it. If you give it away today you set a precedent where MCE cannot really be a cash cow of the future. If you gave away the application that is MCE people would just load it on to their existing XP operating system PCs. Microsoft doesn’t want that. They want to sell you an entire second operating system and get the dough that comes along with that. And if MCE is as big as it is in Gate’s head (and this is much bigger than the folks at Jupiter would guess) then giving away the software doesn’t make sense to him.

I would not disagree that these insights reflect the mood at Microsoft, but let me defend my suggestion that it would be a sound business move by Microsoft and my reasoning behind it. Let’s look at the costs and benefits.

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A few weeks ago, Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research created a “blog with us” program allowing a few bloggers access to a Jupiter Research report and asked them to post their feedback. Along with Thomas Hawk (his take on the report here), I asked to take a look at an intriguing report entitled “PC and Standalone Digital Video Recorders, Strategies to cope with an Uncertain Market”. After reading the report, I understand why Jupiter Research is a household name to marketers and why their reports are so popular. I’m very thankful to have the opportunity to read this report in particular.

The bottom line of the report, after slicing and dicing the demographics and industry trends of the DVR market, is that there will be significant growth in the DVR market primarily coming from cable and satellite operators who have significant advantages in the marketplace. It’s hard to argue against their logic and data, but I have a feeling one company would undoubtedly like to make them look wrong.

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Comcast CEO Brian Roberts quote on the PSP:

“There’s going to be a very huge proportion of viewers that isn’t watching [TV programming] live, and the industry is going to have to work together to find ways to deal with that.”

(Hat Tip: TVPredictions.com)

Via tarheel-euphoric DigitalMerging.la, News.com quotes Michael Arrieta, senior vice president of Sony Pictures:

“We want to set business models, pricing models, distribution models like (Apple Computer CEO Steve) Jobs did for music, but for the film industry.”

Further in the news article:

To that end, Arrieta said, his group plans to digitize Sony Pictures’ top 500 films and make them available for the first time in various digital environments within the next year. He said the distribution for films like “Spider-Man 2″ will go beyond just Movielink, the video-on-demand joint venture of Sony Pictures and several other major studios, which to date has hosted a limited library of Sony’s movies.

For example, Sony plans to sell and make films available in flash memory for mobile phones in the next year, Arrieta said. It also will further develop its digital stores for downloading and owning films on the PC, he said in an interview.

While not specifically mentioned in the article, it also certainly means support for the PSP, which in my mind, is no brainer service for young professionals that travel for business. Software like PSP Video 9 are certainly handy for PSP users, but I’ll trade the hassles of converting a DVD to a usable file format and the hours it takes to transcode it for an inexpensive download of a video file that must be watched within a few days.

Build Your Own PVR has created some new digs for their user forum. If you’ve never checked out the BYOPVR user forums, it’s a really great resource for people trying to build their on DVR solution. It’s a good community with a lot of friendly and knowledgeable people, and an excellent option for people trying to get their questions answered.