48 thoughts on “TiVo Schedules NYC Event for March 2nd”

  3. Was about to pull the trigger on Moxi but will wait to see what TiVo is up to. Love moxi’s streaming video model which means paying cable co for only one cable card/digital outlet and only managing one play list. Any chance you will demo Moxi moxi mate any time soon?

  4. Marte, Digeo/ARRIS had promised me a Mate in December, but they’ve had a change of heart and I’m on hold while they ensure there’s enough inventory for prospective customers. It’s too bad really as the whole-home streaming appears quite compelling. So I’ll report on it whenever they grace me with a unit.

  5. “re-enact the day after tomorrow” LOL

    but umm yeah, TiVo has hyped this pretty hard, did they borrow a PR template from google or do they have something? Looking to you for answers Dave. :)

  6. I have a feeling that you already know or have a pretty darn good idea of what they’ll announced. Perhaps something you saw/heard during CES private invite? :)

  8. That’s a ballsy title there – sets the bar a little high for their announcement. I was just about to jump ship, but will wait to see what they have going.

    How about a “whole house” solution with streaming to extender type boxes and a COMPLETE re-write of their UI?

    It’s been a long, long time since Tivo has come out with anything innovative. New ways to share my watching habits and push ads at me do nothing but piss me off and drive me to another solution.

    Cautiously optimistic.

  9. Okay, here’s my completely unrealistic wish: $199, HD, built-in BD player, DLNA 9no more TiVo Desktop), updated interface, and optional(!) monthly service charge (either show me ads and don’t charge me, or charge me and don’t show me ads – no double-dipping!).

    While I’m at it: Complete iTunes store integration, and no more Java-based, server-side apps!

    Yeah.

    Well, that’s not happening.

  10. I agree that’s quite ambitious. Don’t pull an Apple and let the hype get over the moon and then disappoint because it doesn’t have a camera.

    If its nothing short of a whole-home solution I’ll be disappointed. I just want a box that sits in the closet with a M-Card, 4-stream decoder, USB and Gbe/Wifi-N and coax in. Then give me cheap STBs throughout the house.

  11. What I want is a DirecTV system I can be proud to own.

    My prediction: a Tivo “boxee-box-style” device with DVR capabilities & the ability to stream media files, Netflix, etc.

  12. How about they settle with dishnetwork and release a DVR that includes OTA & dish support 2 tuners each, a blu-ray player, and sling box features!

  13. If it’s a new unit and I want to purchase it. I want the ability to transfer settings & season passes from my Series 3 that I have been creating for years.

  14. What would be shocking is if anything cool was actually announced. Seriously TiVo, what have you done for us lately?

    If none of the following is announced it’ll be very disappointing.

    A four Tuner model.
    New 3D user Interface that looks like the new search, but faster.
    MoCA for MRV instead of requiring CAT5 or WiFi.
    MRV that includes automatic conflict resolution and a unified Now Playing and To Do list of the entire house. And works with Copy Once content.
    Tru2way UI for VOD and to eliminate the need for a Tuning Adapter.
    DLNA Client instead of TiVo’s proprietary protocol.

  15. It’s probably the cost conscious TiVo “Premiere” (Which is smaller, has no fan, and less connections) that was leaked (by a paper insert) the other month to someone who bought a new TiVo HD box.

    I truly hope TiVo comes up with something innovative though. I can’t take TiVo’s lack of forward thinking, innovation, and laziness (no new products or UI re-design) anymore.

    I also completely agree with Geoffrey Sperl on his comment of, “updated interface, and optional(!) monthly service charge (either show me ads and don’t charge me, or charge me and don’t show me ads – no double-dipping!).”

    Please TiVo, don’t disappoint.

    Sincerely,

  16. It could be awesome, think of all the time they have had to dedicate to R&D. I mean it’s not like they have been spending a ton of time working on updates/upgrades to the existing lineup for the last year or two :)

    /rant on

    I have one HD, 2 Series 3’s and like four older boxes (including one of the original Phillips boxes) sitting in my basement deactivated. So as a user for like 11 years now (?) and I can’t remember such a bleak time for innovation/updates for my boxes or new equipment than the last year or two. Maybe I’m just not into the whole spend six months on doing nothing but integrating Blockbuster when there are four other movie services that have the same titles available??? I love choice, but I would rather they had spent the time fixing my boxes so it doesn’t have all sorts of problems with TWC’s stupid SDV box (which makes my Tivo look really reliable as it is the biggest piece of junk I may have ever owned). I always laughed at the TWC DVR’s I’ve had over the years with their crashing, rebooting, blank screens, etc. and I hate to say it, but over the last year, it has become a common issue with each of my Tivo’s and I’m pretty sick of it. Tivo fans will point out that it is the SDV box causing many of the problems and not my Tivo, but given they worked together on it, I still hold Tivo partially responsible – it’s that annoying.

    /rant off

  17. Smaller base units and an ‘extenders’ to enable whole house DVR so that I don’t need a full box at every TV would be nice. An iPad/iTouch remote app that allows me to review the Guide and manage the DVR w/o interupting the TV show. DNLA would be a bonus. Sling type integration would be a major bonus.

  19. Both the already-leaked TiVo Premiere, and the TiVo Premiere Elite. The Elite has two CableCard M-only slots on the back, and handles 4 streams. Supports multiple external eSATA drives, including those larger than 1 TB.

    …Don’t I wish.

  20. That’s a small (~150 for dinner) venue in NBC’s building. I’m guessing Dave doesn’t get a “plus-one” invite.

  21. to all those wanting a whole house “now playing list”. How many TVs and TiVo DVRs do you have? I have 3 TVs and 4 currently active TiVo DVRs but the shows recorded are fairly segragated by the place the TV is. for instance there is a TV and TiVo in our bonus room for the kids to watch TV on. Shows can be MRVed from there to other floors but when I sit down to watch TV in the living room the lst thing I want is all the kids shows addded into the now playing list.

  22. Shawn, I’ve been to very few press events where a +1, beyond colleagues/team, is welcome. Then again, the prior TiVo events I’ve hit in NYC and most evening gatherings have more of a party atmosphere and are not necessarily limited to press, analysts, investors. 6PM is a weird time – maybe it is dinner. I didn’t even bother to ask. Do you want to be my date?

  23. I hope TiVo gives us a faster box that is actually capable of doing a real HD interface, real searching (that completes in under five minutes) and some real streaming capabilities from Netflix, Amazon, etc.

    Anything less is going to suck donkey balls.

    I would love a whole home setup with streaming from a single bad-ass “mega TiVo” but highly doubt that we will see that from TiVo. They’ve been coasting on their 10 year old patents for this long, why not try to get another 10 years out of their stale thinking?

    If all TiVo has to offer is a revamped UI on the same slow ass hardware then I will probably be dumping them for Moxi when my contract is up.

  24. @Zeo: Unless something happened while I haven’t been paying attention – MRV – yeah that works well on about 30 analog stations (well it’s more like 60, but only 30 after I take out all the shop @ home channels or the other associated stuff I have deleted from my channel lineup).

    I’m not sure want MSO you have, but TWC here has everything Digital locked down and I’m a sucker for HD so I’m really out of luck.

  25. TiVo has two strengths in my household:

    1) It has been very stable (2 TiVoHD’s and 4 DirecTivos before that)

    2) The UI is very straightforward, and is well understood.

    I would like TiVo to continue to the the Entertainment system UI at my household. I’d like to see them speed up and organize their UI without drastically confusing my household. I’d like to see tighter integration with my other sources of media, for example, my iTunes library.

  26. Dave, that’s going to be a hot ticket – hold out for a hotter date. (And, as my wife reminds me, I’m actually scheduled to fly out of LaGuardia at 6:00 on March 2nd.)

    Liveblog it though. Delta doesn’t have in-flight wi-fi on that route but I want to know what the big deal is before I hit baggage claim in Detroit.

  27. The fact that Dave 1) knows that it is, and 2) is planning to travel to NYC for the announcement, tells me that Tivo is probably going to announce something very interesting.

  28. I’m grasping here…………but there might be some Google involvement in this announcement. The colors of the circles in the invitation are different than the colors in the TiVo logo…but they curiously look like Google’s colors. Like I said, I am grasping and it is purely speculation.

  29. Shawn, Not dinner. It’s hors’dourves and drinks. Sounds like they’re getting an early start to catch the NYC press before they leave the city for the day.

    dwgsp, Because I do know and potential restrictions on what I can say and when, I may skip the trip. Not to mention, Engadget, Giz, and CrunchGear can live blog much more effectively than me by my lonesome. Plus my PTO is also quite low, into negative territory in fact. We’ll see…

  31. This ain’t too hard to figger.

    The Premiere will be launched.

    The question is whether it’ll be $199 or $99. (Since they’ve got the monthly revenue, they should give the boxes away at cost.)

    The HD UI will be launched. One assumes the UI will finally become non-modal as well.

    The question is whether the new UI will roll out to older boxes or not.

    —–

    Nothing earth shattering. It will be as it as always been: The TiVo as the worst DVR in the world except for all the other DVR’s.

  34. @spsmyk
    well if you can not MRV then a whole house Now playing Menu and cooperative scheduling wou;ld not od you much good either.
    Note I siad I do not want whole house now playing menu – Stuff is on certain TiVo DVRs for a reason.

    Now if TiVo turns on streaming – that would be something else.

  35. When first reading this post I

    :)

    Then after reading the comments

    :(

    We all know what we need it to be to keep us around, but it isn’t going to be that.

  37. What.. no comments on the seeming “olympics rings”??
    Curious that this event is right after the Olympics conclude.
    Too bad they couldn’t get it out in concert with them… but then again, who is watching the Olympics?
    Colbert had it–no snow in Vancouver…

    Seriously though, Tru2Way NEEDS to happen… cable boxes and “tuning adapters” are SO 1980… very bad throwback…. surprising more “regular folk” I know don’t complain about having to have a cable box. Oh, and what about us poor BrightHouse TampaBay folk who cannot get M cards???

    Cable co’s refusing to cooperate w/ FCC rules, else facing slap-on-wrist punishment, will be the death of TiVo and the like. Regular folk will just accept the cableco dvrs, in my experience…

  38. The only way I would consider a Tivo:

    Tru2Way support. No tuning adapters, plus Cable VOD support. What happened with that partnership with Seachange to tap into the Cable VOD system? Tru2Way Java/OCAP and EBIF support (Caller ID on screen app, and whatever other app the Cable co. wants to provide).

    A true HD interface with fluent screen transitions and graphical effects to keep the experience polished and modern.

    Updated hardware to be able to run the said new experience with no slowdowns and fast data mining. Perhaps something akin to Nvidia Ion2 with hardware flash HD decoding support. Heavy into flash with the UI, and able to pull flash encoded video from the web. A dual core processor 1 to 2 GHz to keep the new UI and experience snappy with room to grow for future software updates and applications. More RAM (RAM is dirt cheap anyway). How about an appstore? Facebook and twitter from the Tivo? Last.fm, pandora, slacker, etc…

    MoCA for entire home sharing. How about small/cheap hard drive less clients. Think Moxi/Moxi-mate model.

    At least 4 tuners, because once you start sharing content through the house, and other rooms start scheduling recordings, your going to require more tuners.

    500GB minimum, or 1TB if they can get a deal on bulk hard drives. Disk space is dirt cheap right now too.

    Social content aspects. Think BOXEE!

    Do all that, and Tivo, you will pull in a hell of a lot of new Gen-Y customers, like myself.

    I was considering Moxi, but I was going to wait and see if a new HTPC with the Ceton card works well and possibly build a system with that solution. But now if Tivo can simplify it and load it with great features with a pretty face, then I’ll take the easy route.

  39. As far as I know, Tru2Way forces the cableco’s UI onto what set top box uses it. As such, it is less than ideal for the Tivo. A big part of the value proposition for the Tivo lies in the UI, which needs to be consistent and singular (multiple inconsistent UIs is a bad idea for any device). Tivo has already departed a bit from this in the past, but at least we don’t have ugly Cableco VOD screens on the Tivo.

    In the modern world, any properly designed interface should have the UI and the data feeds decoupled. I was stunned to learn this wasn’t possible with Tru2way and immediately stopped caring. Being forced to the use the native CableCo UI with Tru2way is so 1990s.

  40. Well Tivo partnered with Seachange a year ago.
    http://cable.tmcnet.com/topics/cable/articles/51504-tivo-seachange-help-cable-operators-combine-dvr-vod.htm

    HOPE it’s coming.

    Officials at TiVo Inc. say they’ve joined Acton, Massachusetts-based SeaChange International in a plan to help cable operators without OCAP/tru2way deployment plans to boost their offerings by quickly deploying TiVo (News – Alert) set-top boxes that seamlessly integrate VOD in a single, intuitive interface.

    According to Tom Rogers (News – Alert), TiVo’s president and chief executive officer, the solution will help MSOs boost on-demand offerings by highlighting VOD titles within TiVo universal search results.

    “And the beauty of this is that it can be achieved faster and at a lower cost than most solutions that have been available to cable operators to date,” Rogers said.

  42. All I care about is:

    – stable, non-crummy interface
    – 3 to 4 tuners.
    – MRV w/cheap extenders
    – Tru-two way for cable VOD / no tuning adapters
    – 500 GB min, with easy expanders
    – Pricepoint w/lifetime below $700
    – no messing with the critical 30 second skip

  43. Tru2Way for cable would be great as a larger initiative, but something I’m concerned about now (as a brand-new FIOS subscriber) is IPTV. Having an architecture (possibly MoCA based, with activated MPEG-4 decoding) that would allow for eventual IPTV processing would make this really future proof.

    And beefed-up hardware: on my current configuration with the significantly larger FIOS channel base, there are points where my TiVoHD is just crawling from page to page.

  45. My prediction would likely be something less than spectacular but if I had my drothers the announcement would include:

    – more tuners, 3-4 please
    – Tru2Way for SDV and On Demand support
    – updated UI, including for Amazon On Demand (series episodes in original order, thumbnails, etc)
    – streaming of copy-once content
    – remote delete for MRV content
    – backup and restore of season passes online
    – iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad application with full control including access to season passes, guide, scheduling, watching remotely a la Sling, display of iPhone photos on TV or music from iPod Touch on HiFi, etc etc
    – A new remote that is EXACTLY like the current remote yet somehow has a QWERTY keyboard inside it (maybe just two remotes, or one of them is my iPhone)
    – built in sling capabilities for remote access
    – ability to examine upcoming conflicts and change how they resolve
    – ability to record whole series without duplication, organized by show, season, episode on massive disks
    – an app store, open enough that we can somehow sneak in one that scrubs commercials from shows (or perhaps a jailbreak to allow this)
    – ability to record a show only once a day no matter what, without resorting to manual recordings or recording whatever shows instead of The Daily Show on Fridays.
    – ability to resolve conflicts by recording later reairs if possible rather than by priority if allowed
    – a RED DOT on the Guide for things that are going to be recorded
    – a MUCH FASTER UI
    – ability to browse shows on Hulu, ABC, TV.com/CBS et al and view them on my TV
    – ability to play shows from my TV without requiring transcoding
    – ability to handle DVD and BR rips with full navigation, GUI, chapters, extras, captions, etc

    Will we get much/any of this? I kinda doubt it… I still love my Tivos though…

  47. Jack, I talked to TiVo on Friday and do indeed know what’s coming based on my CES briefing, so I’m skipping the trip to NYC. Not yet sure on timing for the embargo lift, we’re expected to find out on Monday. I assume it’ll coincide with the beginning or end of this event though. Which means I better start writing something. :)

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