Looks like I only managed to get half the story last Sunday – it was literally the last 5 minutes of the event and I missed a critical piece of the equation. Thursday AM I managed to swing by TiVo’s booth and got a bit more information…
In addition to manually configuring video folder monitoring on a PC as I reported, TiVo users will also be able to subscribe to categorized video podcasts on-box. For example, in the screenshot above we’re looking at the upcoming merged TiVoCast + Web Video area, within the Comedy section. We’ll still need a PC and TiVo Desktop to manage the downloads and perform video conversions, but this isn’t nearly as geeky as I thought. (Though, keeping the PC on will still be a conceptual hurdle for many.) The advanced Desktop option is pretty much for folks who aren’t offered the feeds they want via the TiVo interface, already have iTunes configured, or have other sorts of video (BitTorrent?) they’d like to auto-convert.
Both the TiVo update and new PC Desktop software (2.6) are scheduled for a March delivery. And while I couldn’t get anything specific out of TiVo, they seemed quite aware of their Mac clientèle and the additional video playback capabilities of the Series3/HD platform… I think it’s safe to assume that we’ll be seeing Mac support and less PC transcoding at a later date.