Cool Tech Reviews

Ed Oswald at BetaNews has the story:

Most TiVo customers use the devices to skip over commercials within recorded shows. However, the DVR maker on Monday announced that beginning in the spring of 2006, it would use the set-top box to deliver on-demand advertising to interested subscribers.

TiVo says this is the first time television would be used as a medium to deliver such targeted ads to potential customers. These commercials would be found based on keyword searches, similar to the way Internet advertising currently works.

A user would be able to search for information on products or services based on particular needs. The ads would be set up into various categories, including automotive, travel, telecommunications and consumer-packaged goods. TiVo says the ads would be non-intrusive and interactive, and only offered on an opt-in basis.

I presume that these are more like infomercials than 30-second spots, but I’m still rather dubious. So is Wall Street:

“I continue to question whether any of these initiatives are going to be accretive to shareholders,” said April Horace, an analyst at Hoefer & Arnett Inc. “I don’t see the revenue opportunity anytime in the near term.”

TiVo shares fell 2.69 percent, or 16 cents, to $5.78 on Nasdaq at mid-afternoon.

May Wong at the AP:

TiVo Inc. is expanding its video recording service so users will be able to transfer recorded television shows onto Apple Computer Inc.’s iPods or Sony Corp.’s PlayStation Portable — the latest move aimed at putting TV in people’s hands for viewing anywhere.

The enhanced TiVoToGo feature being announced Monday will also add more copy-protection measures to discourage possible copyright abuse that would anger Hollywood.

TiVo officials said shows recorded via TiVoToGo will have digital watermarks. The extra encoding will follow the copied program wherever it goes, giving TiVo the ability to trace the origin of a transferred program that might get posted freely onto the Internet.

With its introduction in January of TiVoToGo, the digital video recording pioneer gave its broadband Series2 subscribers the ability to transfer recorded shows to Windows-based PCs and laptops as well as portable media players. But the service was available only to devices compatible with Microsoft Corp.’s Portable Media Center platform, such as Creative Technology Ltd.’s Zen.

Now, by adding support for the MPEG-4 video format, TiVo hopes to capitalize on the popularity of iPods and PSPs, which are among today’s hottest handheld gadgets with video capabilities.

Not a bad plan, particularly including both the iPod and the PSP, but there is a catch.

The new service feature will be available Monday for current TiVo subscribers as a beta test and for the general public in the first quarter of next year.

Consumers would need certain video encoding software on their computers, provided by TiVo or purchased elsewhere for about $15 to $30 in stores.

The enhanced TiVoToGo also will allow users for the first time to set their TiVos to automatically load new recordings of their favorite programs to portable gadgets via their PC. The recordings would be transferred overnight, similar to how shows are downloaded to TiVo boxes overnight for those who request automatic recording of certain programs.

Don’t expect instant gratification: The transfer process from a TiVo Series2 set-top-box to a PC — a necessary step before syncing to a portable — occurs roughly in real-time. An hour-long show will take an hour to transfer to the PC, then roughly another 10 minutes or so to sync to a portable device.

I guess you’ll really have to want to watch something on the small screen.

Jason Cross checks them out at ExtremeTech:

Let’s say you don’t have Media Center Edition and don’t want to wipe your drive and install it. You have Windows XP and simply want to add a TV tuner card and PVR type functions so you can hook your PC to your TV or sit across the room from your large monitor and enjoy all the benefits of TiVo. There are quite a few programs available that let you do that; we’ll examine three of them today, including SnapStream’s Beyond TV, Cyberlink’s PowerCinema, and SageTV.

We were planning to include InterVideo’s Home Theater 2, but ran into some insurmountable setup problems with it and were unable to test it for this roundup. We’ll continue trying to get it working, so look for a review of it in the future. People familiar with PVR applications for the PC are probably aware of Myth TV, and are wondering why the free homebrew project isn’t included. The answer is simple: It requires Linux. There’s nothing wrong with Linux at all, but our roundup focuses on competing Windows applications. Besides, if you want to turn your PC into a PVR with Linux, Myth TV is pretty much your only good option.

Hit the link for the details, but all the applications tested had various annoying oddities. That’s too bad, because a good PVR package might attract a crowd.