Our friends at PVRblog have done a good job of covering the announcements that TiVo made at the Consumer Electronics Show on Thursday. It’s hard to know which of these announcements TiVo fans will consider more important.
TiVo and DirecTV announced an HDTV-capable digital video recorder that will reportedly be available in the first quarter of 2004. According to the article, “The DIRECTV HD DVR will incorporate a 250 GB hard disk drive” (seems incredible to me), will have component and digital video outputs, and will support 480i, 480p, 720p, or 1080i formats. Amazingly, the unit will simultaneously record up to two DirecTV or ATSC programs while allowing playback of a third program. The article also points to useful information on TiVo’s website that explains features and required equipment in as much detail as is possible to know right now.
The other announcement from TiVo is TiVo-to-Go, a video extraction solution that allows TiVo users to copy recorded programming to PCs or DVDs. Apparently, this includes some digital rights management mechanism that is intended to make it very difficult to play the recorded programs in any way that would not be considered private use. I’ll have to keep an eye on this to see if more details emerge, because I don’t fully understand this service yet.