ReplayTV and TVIO are in a race...
BTW: Word is ReplayTV uses the Sony encoder which means they are using a separate decoder. Not sure about this one tho'.
techweb.com
TiVo Introduces Fast-Forward TV
(12/19/98, 12:47 p.m. ET)
By John Gartner, TechWeb
Silicon Valley start-up TiVo has begun field trials of a new personalized TV service that it says will revolutionize TV viewing in the same way the Internet changed information delivery.
On Monday, TiVo will debut its service in Los Altos, Calif., as well as a partnership with disk-drive maker Quantum to provide custom hardware for the receiver boxes.
TiVo is also licensing its technology to cable TV operators and consumer-electronics companies to merge the service into next-generation appliances.
Quantum will make high-speed hard drives optimized for delivering multiple streams of audio and video between the TiVo receiver and the television. TiVo has designed custom processor chips to process and manage the streaming MPEG-2 data, so users can pause, fast forward, rewind, and replay any television broadcast.
TiVo's TView hardware platform includes real-time MPEG encoder chips and proprietary database and storage systems. It's now being offered to television, DVD, VCR and set-top manufacturers for integration with their products.
Merging TiVo and these devices makes for "perfect convergence products," said Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications.
DirecTV and local cable operators are participating in the Los Altos field trials. TiVo expects to announce agreements with an additional 12 partners in the coming months.
The TiVo service tracks user viewing and stores up to 20 hours of programs that can be viewed any time. The receiver box will sell for about $500; the monthly fee for the service will start at less than $10.
"Five hundred dollars won't be an impediment to the first wave of adopters who will pay almost anything to get the service," said Arlen, who expects prices to drop sharply before a national rollout. The ability to pause live TV and replay it in slow motion justifies the $10 monthly fee, which otherwise would have been spent on TV Guide, Arlen added.
The TiVo service is partially modeled after the Internet's always-available content and search and browse features, said Stacy Jolna, vice president of programming at TiVo.
Jolna came to TiVo from Microsoft's WebTV. With 99 percent penetration of TVs in U.S. homes, he thinks letting users search television programming is a greater opportunity than TV-based Web browsing. "This has the potential to be bigger than the Internet," Jolna said.
Josh Bernoff, principal analyst for TV research at Forrester Research, said people will pay to have greater control over programming. "The battle will be fought over ease of use, not advances in technology," said Bernoff. TiVo is applying smart-agent technology used to track usage patterns on the Web. Jolna said the agent technology automatically matches a user's likes and dislikes against the available broadcast content to recommend programming. Users can also search based on genre, or the name of an actor or a show.
Jolna said user-viewing data is kept private, as the information is stored locally and sent back to TiVo servers in aggregate. Users can opt to provide demographic information, which TiVo hopes will let it eventually replace standard advertising with ads targeted to a particular viewer.
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