THE SWISS ARMY KNIFE OF TV:
The popularity of Internet video has skyrocketed since the widespread adoption of broadband, and an online video portal like YouTube has become as much a brand-turned-noun/verb as, way TiVo.
“Video is interesting for a certain segment to see on a laptop or PC,” Tom Rogers, TiVo’s chief executive, told the Times. “But for a majority of people, it’s not going to be television until it’s on the TV set.”
Newer models of TiVo recorders can connect to the Internet, but video standards have made it impossible for Internet files — generally available as MPEG4 or QuickTime files, or as proprietary streaming video from sites like Google video — to be played on personal video recorders, which generally use the MPEG2 standard.
TiVo has negotiated with content providers like the Times, iVillage and Heavy.com to convert their offerings to MPEG2, and are anticipating future deals with CBS and Forbes to add more.
Of course, the 500-pound gorilla of the online video world — YouTube — isn’t going to be available on TiVo machines, mostly because the site, recently acquired by Google, offers its video files in Adobe’s Flash format.
Did you get all that?
Rogers said the company was working toward a single method of searching for both network and online content — the only way of making this work for consumers, really, who don’t want watching TV to get more complex than just picking up the remote and turning the box on.
“People don’t care how a program is delivered,” Rogers said, which might be the only thing you can take to the bank in the whole Times story.
The truth is that everybody — the networks, hardware and software companies, many very big companies who should know better and countless start-ups who’ve disappeared into the void — has been trying to implement the chimera that is “convergence” since before the Internet was in more than a scant minority of homes. The other truth is that it’s going to happen, whether we want it to or not.
Right now, hundreds of companies are working toward making your computer and your TV talk to each other, and eventually they’ll make it happen, through piecemeal little efforts like TiVos, and at the cost of millions, even billions, of what might look like wasted dollars. It’s the technological version of evolution, and a lot of three-legged fish and feathered rodents — such as TiVo’s newest effort — are going to go extinct before it actually works.
