Engadget’s received word that TiVo’s Hulu Plus app has entered beta testing. Internet-sourced content such as this is a nice to have, but won’t move many units on its own – taking a back seat to MSO deals and patent litigation. However, a recent survey seems to suggest the sort of compelling features that could indeed increase TiVo retail sales.
As shown above, TiVo wonders how folks might feel about piping live and recorded video to a content to an iPad. Chalk me up as “Very interested.” TiVoToGo could use a healthy dose of modernization and streaming DVR-ed programming from TiVo to iPad within the home, or beyond, would be quite compelling. Additionally, TiVo is contemplating placeshifting live video. Basically, we’re talking about a Slingbox… without a Slingbox – much like the DISH VIP 922. Although, live “TV” could be sourced elsewhere and resold (like the aforementioned Hulu Plus) or bundled into our TiVo service subscription.
I’d say TiVo’s Premiere hardware is capable of such placeshifting feats. Yet streaming recorded content would be a significant engineering undertaking, and if not already begun, I can’t image we’d see this sort of functionality in 2011 on Series 4 hardware.
Hopefully they will get that other core working so that this can become a reality.
please, bring it. slingplayer on the tivo!
STupid question, but doesn’t the ipad 2 have enough power to do the transcoding itself?
As usual with tivo, about 5 years too late.
You need this with an iphone as well.
Charlie, there’s more than one way to approach it. In my mind it’d be preferable to shrink the video on the TiVo and stream a native iPad codec (like H.264). Even if they didn’t go exactly that route, the TiVo would still require changes as right now both multi-room viewing and TiVoToGo move content by file copying… versus the streaming you’d want for this solution (and what TiVo describes in the survey).
It would also be pretty sweet if TiVo did the reverse, adding AirPlay functionality to the TiVo.
Good point re: file copying. Although I thought the Premiere was fast enough that the copying was starting to look a lot more like streaming….
When does this come out? 2016 at the earliest? Will it be available on DirecTivo when it comes out in 2024?
Charlie, yeah… but do you have something like 20GB free on your iPad to store Modern Marvels or whatever in HD MPEG2? :) (Making that number up, hopefully it’s ballpark.)
Jon, will be interesting to see if AirPlay opens up in that way. But I doubt Apple would give up that competitive technology.
“I can’t image we’d see this sort of functionality in 2011 on Series 4 hardware.”
Can one imagine they’ll finally get the HDUI functionality properly working with an acceptable degree of teh snappy in 2011 on Series 4 hardware?
Cuz I’d imagine that should be a higher development priority than streaming…
I dunno anymore, Chucky… The Premiere has been out about a year and I don’t believe we’ve seen any new HDUI screens added during the last 12 months. It’s even more discouraging when you consider the Premiere was supposed to actually ship in time for the 2009 holiday season. Fortunately, it does seem like TiVo has a vision and it can be completed given what we’ve seen from the Virgin TiVo and a design book, mockups I was shown at CES 2010. But, as far as snappy goes, that’s still unanswered.
It’s funny. I don’t want the HDUI on the Premiere because of the sluggishness. And in the last week, I’ve learned of the current SDUI ten minute freeze bug on the Premiere.
So, not only have I put my plans on hold to upgrade to the Premiere to take advantage of the 2TB limit and better transfer speeds, but if my TiVo HD exploded tomorrow, I’d have to replace it with a used TiVo HD instead of a new Premiere.
TiVo: the worst DVR’s in the world by far, with the exception of all the other DVR’s. What an utterly bizarre company to happily be a customer of…
Airplay isn’t run by Apple — the chipset is in pretty broad use. So getting Tivo to act as airplay receiver would be easy although I don’t see any real advantage for Tivo. (maybe charge customers $25 for the software?)
The other way (tivo to airplay device) would be nice but the same transcoding problems.
There are just so many other things I would rather see first even if they are only available on the iPad. I would much rather see a conflict resolution tool. I would love a tool that assists in prioritizing my season pass list so I can get the best order to record the most shows while making sure I record the shows I want.
As I have been saying for a while, it seems like TiVo is trying to do so many things while not adding anything to improve the original purpose of the TiVo which of course is to record TV.
Tivo should complete their current commitments before taking on new ones.
Like, oh, let’s say, getting the 2 years delayed DirecTV HD Tivo out the fricking door.
More than anything else, these are the features that I’d like: the ability to watch my TiVo anywhere and everywhere, either transferring recordings quickly and easily to my iPhone, streaming recordings/live TV to an iPad or computer over LAN or internet and being able to watch programs not just whenever I want to, but also wherever.
TiVo doesn’t have a good solution for placeshifting on the LAN: no ability to stream from one TiVo to the second. We’re stuck with copying, which is too slow in many cases. What would be appealing about this proposed iPad feature would be placeshifting to the WAN, but considering that they can’t get placeshifting right on the LAN, I have my doubts that TiVo can execute this, either.
The Premiere does solve the slow copying. It takes only a few minutes to copy an hour HD show.
the Tivo is still the only DVR I’ve seen that easily gets TV off my cable system and into my PC. From there I can transfer to nearly anything I want. Real time place shifting would be a great add-on to that, but I’d love to see the ability to watch PPV and OD programing first. They talked about it, but have only rolled it out to cable co owned Premieres so far.
@Al, I agree completely. As much as I bash Tivo, a combination of automatic transfers to iTunes on Tivo To Go plus the Air Video app on my iPhone/iPad already allows me to watch whatever I want (that isn’t on Showtime or HBO and thus isn’t copy protected) on my iDevices already. For those who haven’t tried the Air Video app, it really is VERY VERY good and hey, no monthly fee other than the overage charges from your 3G carrier…
As far as the likelihood of Tivo getting this working WITHOUT using an always running PC, I seriously doubt this is possible with current hardware. The existing Tivo’s basically record whatever the cable company sends out, which is an MPEG-2 transport stream at about 3.75Mbps ish for SD shows and 15Mbps ish for HD shows. Much too high for streaming over 3G or even hotel WiFi. And of course the Apple devices don’t support MPEG-2 video anyway.
You’d have to convert the streams to h.264, preferably in ABR (many bit rates, 2 second chunks, switching depending on available bandwidth) using Apple’s quicktime standards (MPEG-2 transport cut into chunks). Its not really that hard except for the whole transcoding MPEG-2 into h.264 in real time thing. Which is REALLY HARD. Unless Tivo has hardware support in their devices for h.264 encoding, which I doubt, then this isn’t going to be doable with the CPUs Tivo uses on these devices. Sure you can do it on an i5 in real time, maybe even support a single digit number of SD streams. But not on an embedded class CPU.
I presume if Tivo does it, it’ll be thru a PC/Mac being used as a proxy, which honestly makes it as lot more complicated to set up, less interesting for most people who don’t even have desktops anymore, etc. Plus of course like I said, you can already do this…
Glenn, Things like the Hauppauge HD PVR and Slingbox PRO-HD have been encoding HD as HD on the fly for a few years now. Embeddable and affordable. But I’m not sure what the actual, versus potential, TiVo Premiere encoding/transcoding capabilities are. You may want to check out this document, which covers the Broadcom brain and NXP encoder among other things, for some ideas: http://www.scribd.com/doc/28974077/Technical-Review-of-the-TiVo-Premiere
Without transcoding or a second, more manageable encode, I agree streaming DVR-ed content outside the home is unlikely. However, streaming within the home isn’t unreasonable. But maybe that just emphasizes TiVo should have built the 802.11n into Premiere.
Charlie:
For streaming there is no reason to transcode on the destination device. If you have already decoded the frame there is no point in reencoding it just to push it through the hardware decoder and get the decompressed frame you had a second ago, you would just blit it to the framebuffer directly.
The iPad 1 has more than enough horse power decode ~18-19MBps MPEG-2, the issues with doing it would be battery life, paying the licensing fees for the MPEG-2 decoder patents, and the fact that it requires more bandwidth (which effectively cuts the range it works from the base station as speed drops off, as well as reducing the amount of data you can buffer to mitigate hiccups).
I would love for TIVO to do this, however, would it hurt the bottom line? I currently have 3 TIVO’s and my wife wants one now attached to the treadmill, which means another monthly service. If instead I can just add an application to an Ipad, I can avoid the monthly subscription and purchase of a new Tivo DVR. I am all for it…but Maybe I will sell my long position after the court decision.
As for other DVR’s I have tried two, Comcasts and a sattelite provider’s, they really do suck compared to TIVO.
The biggest problem here is that TiVo needs to use a survey to figure out what their handful of customers want as new features. I mean, how out of touch are they? Did comcast need a big survey to figure out I wanted streaming of on demand movies on my iPad via the xfinity app? Doubt it.
Do they even know the correlation of iPad owners to TiVo subscribers? Or iPhone? I would bet that it is very high.
Imagine wht the open source community could come up with if they had access to all the source and APIs for the platform, yet, here they are taking mind numbing surveys.
I love that they’re finally thinking about streaming. Seems ridiculous to have to have a Slingbox sitting on top of the TiVo, or another full TiVo next to every other TV in the house.
Personally I wish they’d update the whole multi-room thing with streaming. Imagine being able to stream shows from a big (capacity) TiVo “server” to other TVs with just a streaming client — ideally built-in to the TV a la Netflix, Amazon, or Vudu, or through a Roku or AppleTV box.
TiVo could be helping lead the bridge between capturing and time-shifting real time cable content and on-demand Internet video. Well, they do that for ONE TV now, but when I want multi-room, I now have to look at something like U-verse to get it, and that means ditching TiVo altogether.
Here’s a simple use case: watching The Daily Show on the treadmill. How do you do it? I don’t want to have to involve a PC or laptop, and it should not require a second full TiVo to transfer the show to since it already exists on my primary TiVo. I just want to stream it to the remote TV…
Why is that so difficult? There are lots of geek-hacks to make this work, and I can do at least three of them myself, but my wife or kids would not bother with any of them.
Hey shortTiVo , if u have the HD TiVo and wi fi hooked up , you can go to amazon and buy a hdmi splitter and a hdmi wire and connect one TiVo to a few tv’ s . With wifi you can control the tivo on any tv . So u can connect a tv and run a wire to the TiVo with the splitter and ull save on buying another TiVo and a monthly fee