January 8, 2009, 02:34 PM EST CES: Tivo Bets on TV Search
By Nick Wingfield Wall Street Journal http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/01/08/ces-tivo-bets-on-tv-search/?mod=rss_WSJBlog?mod= Channel surfing is dead. Thats the slogan TiVo is bandying about this years CES. Theyve plastered a variation of it on a surf board in their booth. TiVo CEO Tom Rogers told me they even hired young woman in swimsuits to walk around muttering the slogan, though I didnt see any of them with my own eyes. Its an odd thing to hear at an electronics show that probably has more televisions per square inch than any other place on the planet at the moment. TiVos point is that the era of live television watching is largely being replaced by on-demand viewing of the kind enabled by digital video recorders. What will replace channel surfing, Rogers says, is search Google for your TV set. Search is becoming especially important as users now have hundreds of channels available to them through traditional television, along with loads of online sources of content the devices like TiVo can bring into the living room. Sure enough, at CES TiVo announced a new search function for its DVRs that lets TiVo users enter the titles of shows they want to watch and record using their remote controls, scanning for matches on the array of content available on traditional cable and satellite, along with Internet sources. Although most cable and satellite television operators offer search functions, it is often clunky and hard to navigate. TiVo aims to make TV search easier. In a demonstration at TiVos booth, Rogers showed me how you can quickly enter the first couple letters of Gilmore Girls through an on-screen keyboard. TiVo found a number of results, including a match that would have easily let us record the show from traditional television when it aired. It also offered the option of buying and immediately downloading an episode for $1.99 through Amazon. TiVo even offered Gilmore Girls outtakes posted to YouTube almost like the extras you get on DVDs for movies and TV shows. If search is going to take off on the TV though, Rogers admits theres one area that still needs work: entering text on existing remotes is a clunky. He said TiVo is evaluating a host of different ways to make that experience better, including expanded keyboards on their remotes. ================================================= George Antunes Voice (713) 743-3923 Associate Professor Fax (713) 743-3927 Political Science Internet: antunes at uh dot edu University of Houston Houston, TX 77204-3011 *********************************** * POST TO [email protected] * *********************************** Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
