Like most folks, I’m excited by TiVo’s recent announcement of upcoming support for both the iPod and PSP. So I had to find out more… I hit up Bob Poniatowski of TiVo Product Marketing, who shared a few more details of the project with me.
The new syncing, conversion, and watermarking features will be built into a future release of the TiVo Desktop. TiVo Desktop downloads will continue to be free, as will current functionality. However, the iPod and PSP enhancements are dormant options that can be activated through purchase. Many folks have wondered about the “low cost” and “small fee” that keeps showing up in print… Instead of using the free ffmpeg to perform conversions, as Videora and others do, the fee will partialy cover licensing of the commercial codec TiVo is using to perform the heavy lifting. They have no plans of bundling the TiVo-branded media player, first seen during TiVo Desktop 2.1 beta testing, into this release.
As previously reported, beta testing of the new software is expected to begin shortly with a target release of February.
I think this is a great move by TiVo, I hate Apple computers idea of selling shows for $2,00 what a rip off this is a way better Idea.
Cool. I can hardly wait. I have a 5G iPod and TIVO. I’ve successfully downloaded programs to my iPod but a. it takes several steps b. it’s difficult to transfer multiple shows and c. after i got to Japan, i found that i had audio/video sync problems on several of the shows i downloaded :(. I would love to be able to set up my computer to transfer 20 hrs or so of TV prior to a biz trip. (Too bad my company laptop’s networking setup makes TTG prohibitively slow.. i mean like 20 hrs of transfer time for a 1 hr program. On the other hand, the iPod is nice and lightweight for on the plane. I can eat dinner and watch my show at the same time — even with a seatmate :).