As first disclosed at CES, Yahoo is moving into the PC DVR market in addition to providing other couch-based multimedia functionality. But why reinvent the wheel, when you can buy it? Congrats, Meedio — you’ve escaped ShowShifter’s fate! Back at CES, Thomas Hawk learned Go TV would be a free offering similar to Google’s method of buying up and distributing Picasa. I assume Yahoo will ultimately leverage the Meedio platform to interface with their music services and perhaps offer movie downloads. So I guess we can end speculation that Yahoo will buy TiVo… or can we?
Meedio says:
Today is a big day for the team here at Meedio; we have sold most of our technology to Yahoo!David Brott, Jeff (beergeek), Kenny (fasttech), Pedro (flea0) and I are joining Yahoo!’s Digital Home team. We’ve had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with Yahoo! in the past few months and we love the way they are developing the best, most user-friendly services for the Digital Home.
The first HD DVD player is now for sale at my local Best Buy (Washington, DC), though they have no DVDs to go along with it. In fact, they didn’t even have a sample HD disc in the demo unit. The Toshiba HD-A1 is pretty bulky, even larger than the initial batch of first gen DVD players, but the remote is sexy. At $499 with a questionable improvement in picture quality, potentially restrictive HDMI requirements, and unhacked copy protection I’ll be on the sidelines for at least a year. By the time I get onboard, perhaps dual HD DVD/Blu-ray players will exist or maybe one format will have been decided upon… Yeah, right!