The TiVo Bolt narrative is coalescing… We’ve seen the trademark filings. And we’ve seen the CableLabs certification. Now, by way of Google (above) pointing to TiVo’s own website (below), we can divine that the TiVo Bolt “Unified Entertainment System” will be a Roamio replacement. At least to start with. We know for certain there will be … Read more
With no fanfare, Dropbox has arrived in the Roku channel store. And the video playback possibilities are highly intriguing.
Dropbox is a simple way to store and share your files. And now you can bring all the photos and videos in your Dropbox straight to your TV.
Picking up Aereo’s assets back was one of TiVo’s more inspired marketing moves. But I wonder if it’s being squandered…
Since the deal closed, TiVo has sent out several waves of email campaigns to Aereo castaways… that may not be resonating, as TiVo, in its current form, isn’t much of an Aereo replacement.
Harnessing Portlandia to tug on those cord cutting heart-strings, TiVo ratchets up the rhetoric today as they move into aereo.com with an impassioned 237 word plea. Some highlights:
A stitch in time saves nine… Xbox One still has TV-like aspirations, but without cable. Vizio doesn’t want to sell you TVs, they want to sell industry your behavior. Verizon’s upcoming Internet TV service and branding both sound kind of crazy. Security doesn’t seem like a high priority at Roku. Google+ will soon be decoupled … Read more
Just a day or so after sealing the deal, new graphics have been pushed to DirecTV Genie boxes at warp speed to update bootup imagery and the screensaver with AT&T branding. Faster even than Verizon can drop DirecTV from their FiOS offerings. If only making NFL Sunday Ticket available to U-verse could be as efficient… (Thanks Joseph!)
While I’ve been expecting refreshed over-the-air TiVo hardware, given a simplistic repurposing of base Roamio hardware for OTA and the Aereo acquisition, I hadn’t anticipated anything imminent in digital cable… especially with the ongoing CableCARD and successor uncertainty. Heck, I’d even assumed the absurd TiVo Mega was dead. Yet, CableLabs just updated their self certification paperwork… with two new TiVo models.
Historically, we could determine TiVo hardware generation from the first half of the model number and capacity from the second half. I’m not so sure hard drive is still in play these days. Yet, all prior Roamio models begin with 84, so I’d guess these similarly denoted units must be closely related and still represent TiVo Series 5 hardware. As to what exactly they are, I haven’t the foggiest.
These probably don’t represent the TiVo Bolt, which sounds more like a service. But could they be Mega variants? Hopefully not, as I really hope that initiative is dead with engineering resources better detailed to mass market products. But I could still see TiVo moving upmarket in presentation, if not storage, and perhaps these represent 4k-capable Roamio units… and you can check out my previous Broadcom chipset speculation here. Lastly, one of TiVo’s biggest retail challenges remains pricing — so whatever they’re working on hopefully reduces the BOM, with savings passed on to customers.
Perhaps due to frustrating and unreliable home automation products that seemingly haven’t caught on combined with some bad bets by Quirky, Wink appears to be in dire straights – despite cash infusions from GE and a decent retail footprint. Amidst that backdrop, Michal Wolf wonders who might step in to pick up the pieces and walks us through a variety of large companies … that probably have zero interest.
Another day, another interesting trademark to mull over. And like TiVo Bolt, we don’t have much to go on here with Echostar AirTV. Computer hardware and software for streaming audio and video content to a variety of network devices, namely, personal computers, mobile phones, tablet computers and stand-alone hardware decoders So it sounds a lot like … Read more