GOOD BUT NOT GREAT
Tivo is on an announcement tear of late. Barely a couple of weeks after signing a deal with Yahoo!, the company today announces software that enables transfer of programs from your Tivo to your Apple iPod Video and/or Sony Playstation Portable (PSP), both of which I've succumbed and acquired.
The idea is great, but the execution is wanting, in my view. Here are my reasons:
1. It won't come for free. As the New York Times article explains,
"Owners of the Apple or Sony devices will need to pay TiVo to unlock the portion of the new software that converts videos to the MPEG-4 format used by those players. While TiVo has not yet set the price for the software, similar programs typically cost between $15 and $30, Mr. Denney said. The cost will cover licensing fees and other expenses associated with using the MPEG-4 format, he said.
The new TiVo software will also have a syncing feature that will allow subscribers to choose whether they want new recordings of their favorite programs transferred to their portable devices automatically via their PC."
Selling the software rather than give it away, means that only a few geeks like me will buy the software to tinker with, but most of the mainstream 1.3 million Tivo users won't be bothered. Tivo should have at least offered some basic software for free (say, transfer 3 programs free a month), and provided an upgrade option to buy the full-feature software. This is especially relevant since the process of transferring takes extra work by the user (see point no. 3 below).
2. It won't be available until early next year (via LA Times). So again, as in the Yahoo! deal, the announcement precedes really useful features by three to six months.
3. It's not a direct Tivo to device transfer. As the LA Times article explains,
"The TiVo box would need to be connected to a home network and the program would first have to be transferred to a PC.
The company plans to test the features before making them available to its 1.3 million stand-alone subscribers as early as the first quarter of next year."
Way too much work and bother...aka friction.
4. The transferred programs won't have any further portability. This one is not Tivo's fault, and a result of the piracy paranoia of the media industry. As the Seattle Pi (via memeorandum) clarifies,
"TiVo officials said shows recorded via TiVoToGo will have digital watermarks. The extra encoding will follow the copied program wherever it goes, giving TiVo the ability to trace the origin of a transferred program that might get posted freely onto the Internet."
As Fred Wilson puts it succintly:
"The audio iPod is way more than a listening device. It's a place shifting device. I have one iPod, I use to play music in the gym, on my bike, in my car, in my office, walking to work, etc. The same will be true of the PSP and the video iPod."
And the Tivo solution is hampered by the all the video portability restrictions. But hopefully you'll still be able to fast forward through commercials, as BusinessWeek's Stephen Baker points out.
5. Finally, and this again, is not a Tivo issue, and more of a nitpick, unlike the video iPod, the Sony PSP does not have a hard drive, as Jeff Nolan aptly points out:
"The one area that Sony is really coming up short on the PSP is in storage as it lakes a hard drive. There is a company that has a 4gb hard drive expansion for the PSP, but 4gb? Hell, for $230 I can get a 4gb memory stick and it consumes a lot less power than a hard drive. There are rumors that Sony is coming out with a new PSP in 2006 that will remedy this shortcoming, but not too many details have been released."
Overall though the announcement illustrates where all this is going, whether it's from Tivo or not.
Content will eventually flow like water, and seek it's own level.
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