Tivo and Digital Media Servers

Back when they came out, I said that tools like Tivo and Replay could change the face of tele­vi­sion watch­ing. A cou­ple of years ago, I assumed that game boxes would be the new home media cen­ter. What I missed, though, was the end run that Tivo was doing around the game com­pa­nies. With yesterday’s announce­ment that they would offer con­nec­tiv­ity to com­puter plat­form, Tivo is plac­ing itself square in the mid­dle of the con­ver­gence world. Their strat­egy is sim­ple: focus on the core engine and use the PC as a stor­age area. It is brain­dead sim­ple logic. The Tivo box comes with a big hard drive but it is mostly filled with TV pro­gram­ming. Alter­nately, the box does not need to pro­vide web surf­ing as attempts by com­pa­nies like AOL and Microsoft have failed in that space, prob­a­bly bring­ing on the real­iza­tion that most peo­ple don’t want to surf on their tele­vi­sion sets. Thus, Tivo leaves the down­load of music to com­put­ers for now. The rea­son I am say­ing for now is that I expect them to even­tu­ally offer a more wide­spread net­work con­nec­tiv­ity set in the future. How­ever, they real­ize that most Tivo users are prob­a­bly already com­puter users and that they should set their box up as an in-between box. My pre­dic­tion is that within the next cou­ple of years, we will see them start offer­ing more advanced ser­vices to store the data cur­rently on com­put­ers. Once they have done that, we will prob­a­bly see them offer con­nec­tiv­ity to a few down­load ser­vices (along with con­nec­tiv­ity out of box to the PC, leav­ing the hard job (con­nect­ing dif­fer­ent devices like dig­i­tal play­ers and dig­i­tal cam­eras) still in the PC realm.