TiVo TiVo TiVo

FCC Chairman Michael Powell, risking the wrath of the entertainment cartel, said this during a CES Q&A:

My favorite product that I got for Christmas is TiVo. TiVo is God’s machine.

Oh yeah, baby — he gets it, and let’s hope Michael will be a positive force for digital fair use. Gary Shapiro, the head of the Consumer Electronics Association, expressed his hope that Michael’s colleagues in Congress would buy a TiVo as well — Ernest Miller at LawMeme followed up by suggesting a fund to buy a PVR for every member of Congress, but shouldn’t PVR makers be doing this?

In related news, TiVo no longer wants to be lead your home network — it just wants to be an upstanding member of it. As part of their announcements, TiVo senior VP Brodie Keast admitted:

What we found in our market research was that consumers found it awkward to have to manage digital content in two places. The PC has won as the center of digital content.

In other words, our customers see their PC as their content server, and their TiVo as the brains of their television. Interesting.

Supporting their efforts to make TiVo a good home network citizen, TiVo also announced $99 software (TiVo Series2 only) that will allow its PVRs to share content with your PC, and announced that they’ll be supporting Apple’s Rendezvous technology in order to make it easy to discover and connect to TiVos on your network.

Finally, TiVo will be supporting HDTV by the end of this year. If I throw a couple hard drives and a WiFi card into my current TiVo, I should be just fine through 2003, then… Associated Press: FCC’s Powell declares TiVo ‘God’s machine’ | News.com: TiVo wants to join the home network | TiVo PR: Home Media Option| TiVo PR: Standalone HDTV PVRs | TiVo PR: DirecTV HDTV PVRs


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