TiVo today unveiled broadband video downloads, marking the latest move by the digital video recorder company to expand its Internet-related services.
Through the new TiVoCast service, people can download broadband video clips to their TiVo boxes for free from a handful of Internet sites, such as woman-oriented iVillage, technology-focused CNET.com (a News.com sister site), entertainment-grooved Heavy.com, The New York Times, the National Basketball Association and Women's National Basketball Association, and news and political video blog site Rocketboom.
Apparently they plan to expand the number of web-sites they cover (boy will they need to!) and they will run ads alongside the videos to drive revenues. TiVo sure is fighting hard to differentiate themselves - and they need to given Cisco Systems and Motorola, are adding digital recording features to their cable set-top boxes.
I struggle to see though how TiVo survive into the future given that DVR will surely just become a feature within all set-top boxes and intelligent TV's. I guess their patents will help them for a while, but just piling into Internet video alongside everyone else will unlikely help them too much.
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