TiVo's Xbox Box One & Amazon Fire TV Hypotheticals

tivo-firetv

In relation to TiVo’s summer update, the DVR pioneer has disclosed that they’ve moved large swaths of their code base from Adobe Air/Flash to Haxe – resulting in significant performance improvements. Based on the stellar document and YouTube video dug up by BigJimOutlaw, the two year project clearly benefits them (and us) on a number of levels, including less reliance on the resource-intensive Adobe, who has waffled in both the mobile and set-top space.

Beyond shedding light on what TiVo developers have been sidetracked with, the slide of hypotethical video endpoints displaying Amazon Fire TV, Xbox One, and Smart televisions surely intrigues… along with the related Haxe Fire TV demo (below) and TiVo Roku renders shown earlier this year, TiVo seems intent upon extending their experience to non-TiVo hardware. Make it so!

24 thoughts on “TiVo's Xbox Box One & Amazon Fire TV Hypotheticals”

  1. It also doesn’t say hypothetical for the laptop either. I’ll remain optimistic, today is encouraging. :)

  2. Laptop stuff is already in play to some degree for partners like RCN, I think. May or may not end up as a TiVo Desktop replacement or evolution for us retail customers. Beyond the CES Roku renders, I witnessed the full TiVo UI running on Roku a year ago. So maybe they’re finally making good on claims they’re a software and services company – very encouraging for sure.

  3. I just picked up the FireTV and this would be huge if I could stream shows from my Premiere to my FireTV in the other room! Xbox 360 support would be nice too :)

  4. Read over the slides about the Haxe conversion project. That conversion has made my Premieres finally feel like a premium product, performance-wise.

    I won’t get too excited too quickly but having Xbox One as a video endpoint would simply be amazing! Please make it happen TiVo!

  5. This will release two weeks after the last paid cable subscriber on planet Earth dies of old age. 2090, maybe?

  6. It was always a mistake to go with Adobe Air/Flash for the UI.

    That said, the Haxe stuff is pretty awesome! Kind of want to use it in my day job as a software developer now, but probably don’t have a practical case for it.

  7. Ever since I got my Xbox one my oremere had had huge HDMI handshake issues with my TV. To have it come natively out of the Xbox one would be awesome.

    Then just let me watch TiVo on my android phone or tablet without using my data somehow and I am peachy

  8. Huh. So after they finally got their hardware act together with S5, now they’ve got their software act together too. Interesting times.

    (I wonder if TiVo would sabotage these endpoints to protect the Mini, or if they’re more foresighted than that.)

  9. You should absolutely except a monthly service fee equivalent to the TiVo Mini, as seen from DISH with Virtual Joeys and DirecTV’s RVU clients. Beyond TiVo’s speed to deploy, the bigger question for me is would these only be MSO clients … as implied after the Roku pics came out at CES.

  10. @Anthony – I’ve thought the same with regards to them using Flash. When they announced it those who were developing websites had already had enough of Flash and were moving away from it.

    I obviously don’t know for sure but TiVo moving to flash strikes me as someone at TiVo either having Flash in their background and that was easier than learning something new or they wanted to learn Flash. I’ve seen plenty of that in my developer life. Of course, it could have been Adobe coming in selling it as, “This will solve all your problems forever and you’ll never have any problems and it’s cheaper, too!”

  11. No no no. That’s not how major tech deals are done, with engineers evaluating performance, support, ease of use and ease of deployment. It is currently and has always been decided by high level execs and sales people over golf, acquiring lots of Swag in the process. Adobe sales folk must have treated Tivo execs Very Well indeed. Needless to mention, probably none of the execs even took the platform for a ride first.

    The recent Haxie switchover is what typically happens after the engineers are told to clean up the mess, and they almost never get invited to kind of parties that caused the mess in the first place. Life is unfair that way.

  12. Such a relief for Tivo to be moving away from Adobe. This move may be the biggest Tivo news we’ve had since Tivo first released HD hardware! Plus it clears up so many lingering questions – why serious effort wasn’t being put towards completing HD menus, why delays for Android support, why so hard to fix bugs… Sounds like their new dev tools will go a long way towards simplifying simultaneous development across multiple platforms.

  13. Well, my Premiere certainly is snappier!!! Happy happy happy.

    I even like the categories for now. We’ll see over time if I continue to feel that way.

    Seems like a mistake that you can only get into the customization for this with the “A” button. There’s no reason there couldn’t be another way in via settings for those times when I’ve got an older remote (hey, we’ve got a bunch) with no “A”.

  14. Where is the WiiU in that graphic? Wasn’t that supposed to have TiVo functionality a few years ago – one of the minor reasons my son got one for christmas, only to see it sit in the cubby.

  15. Yeah, after brief excitement the TiVo Wii implementation turned about to be nothing more than a glorified remote – similar to existing mobile apps. This functionality was being built by i.TV (who had previously produced an iOS guide app with TiVo integration that stored our passwords in the clear). But, yeah, this marketing announcement never panned out with both iTV and TiVo directing me to Nintendo – who didn’t acknowledge my status inquiry. So that’s dead. As to future stuff, who knows.

  16. Post updated with video of TiVo running on Fire TV! It’s not Android-native at this point, but they think they can get it done. Right now it’s HTML and JavaScript packaged in Java. They had four network DVR (nDVR) test apps loaded (Ono, Com Hem, Virgin, and Domestic) with the Com Hem one clocking in at 27MB and communicating with TiVo cloud infrastructure. Who knows if any nDVR stuff will ever make its way to retail…

  17. “Post updated with video of TiVo running on Fire TV!”

    For the attention-span challenged, where do I timeline to in the hour-long video to see it?

  18. “For most, when they hit play it queues up automatically at about 36:31. But I know you got some weird browser settings….”

    Damn straight. On the downside, no auto-queue for me. But on the bright side, through voodoo trickery, I get my YouTube in browser into Quicktime plug-in MP4’s savable to disc with a simple contextual menu click…

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