One of the more impressive unaffiliated TV guide iPhone apps has seen a massive makeover. In fact, i.TV 3.0 completely drops movie listings, trailers, and theater ticket purchases to exclusively focus on television content… including shows located on Hulu and Netflix. The interface refresh is more than skin deep, and i.TV now brings native support to the iPad. It’s definitely a (free) app worth checking out if your television provider doesn’t offer one to your liking.
On the TiVo front, i.TV has been the unofficial, official TiVo iPhone app. So someone may want to suggest that TiVo, Inc update their website (shown below right) as their screengrab is no longer relevant — i.TV has dropped that virtual TiVo remote control during the redesign. While it’ll return in some form at some point, the virtual Roku remote is gone for good.
Last year, we uncovered a minor security issue related to i.TV and TiVo DVR scheduling:
I did some poking around i.TV’s various files and took a look at the network traffic using Wire Shark. It appears that i.TV uses our TiVo.com credentials once to retrieve a token, valid for one year, which is subsequently used to access our account data and authenticate scheduling requests. While network communication appears secure, our TiVo.com username and password are stored in the clear by i.TV – accessible from both the iPhone file system and computer-based iTunes backup. It’s obviously not best practice; However, in the real world, the security implications are most likely inconsequential.
Well, it looks as if this has finally been put to bed. MethodicJon took a look at the new files for us and there’s no sign of his password in the clear (below left). However, it’s possible the gibberish prior to his username/email is the password… obscured with some function. But given the minimal risk, I’m satisfied and won’t invest time deconstructing it further.