According to an email I received from TiVo yesterday:
TiVo just enhanced your service by adding four new features (formerly bundled as a package called Home Media Option) — all included for your existing monthly fee of just $12.95! Connect your TiVo® Series2â„¢ DVR to your home network to get even more of the entertainment you care about, not just TV, but music, photos and more, with a Digital Music Player, a Digital Photo Viewer, and Multi-Room Viewing. Plus, with TiVo® Online Scheduling, you’ll be able to schedule recordings from the web with as little as one hour before airtime (if you connect to the TiVo® service using broadband).
The Home Media Option was added to every Series 2 TiVo user’s Tivo via software update some time last year. However, to activate the new features, you had to pay up to (an additional) $99 to TiVo, a concept that really annoyed some TiVo users. It reminds me of the history of software itself…does the hardware come with free software, or can the software be bundled separately from the hardware? Looks like TiVo has given up (at least for now) on separately charging for the software upgrades. It will be interesting to see where this goes from here.
Now that the feature is active, many people are disabling the TiVo desktop software and are instead going with an open source package called Java HMO which allows one to do many other things on your TiVo (some of which have IP concerns): playing streaming audio from the Internet, watching Internet web cams, getting your local movie theater listings, local weather, etc. I’m still waiting for the ability to read RSS feeds…
Related posts:
