PVRblog

NBC launching attack on competitors by tweaking PVR owners?

PVR blog reader David Young pointed out some strange listings at NBC this upcoming fall season. Is something sinister going on?

Note the time of the Scrubs premiere show. It starts at 8:32PM. huh? Coupling is a new show that also sports an odd time slot: 9:27PM-9:58PM. ER starts at 9:59PM that same night. Friends runs for 47 minutes and is followed by a 39 minute long Will and Grace. What in the hell is going on? My TiVo is currently reporting these start times as the actual slots for this Thursday and next Thursday's line is mostly back to normal, but ER starts a few minutes early as well.

It appears that NBC might be doing this to tweak PVR owners wanting to record CSI or Survivor over on CBS opposite their shows. If you had a season pass for both CSI and ER (both shows would likely have audiences that overlap) and you wanted to record ER you wouldn't be able to tape CSI during the preceding hour, thanks to the minutes of overlap that would produce a conflict.

Is this how NBC is going to fight the other networks and TiVo owners? By subtle time shifting that requires viewers to cancel their programs on other networks? Didn't they invest a few million into the company a few years ago? What's going on here?

update: Several threads at the tivocommunity site covered this issue and manual hacks are shared. Theories range from NBC trying to steal viewers at CBS to NBC trying to pad ER's higher ad rates as much as possible and spread their audience out to other NBC shows that are offset. Any way you look at it, a lot of TiVo owners are pissed.

$199 TiVos

TiVo is again doing a rebate deal so that new boxes start at $199. The rebates run until 12/31/03, so if you were thinking of getting a new box, you've got the rest of the year to decide.

The King of All Media on TiVo

Today's New York Times magazine has a brief interview with FCC Chair Michael Powell. The topic of TiVo comes up early and often.

You mentioned TiVo. How has TiVo changed your life since you got it?

I think there's something going on in the world that's very profound. We're moving to a world of incredible intimacy in mass media. I'm my own programmer, not NBC. I've got a system looking all around the 300 channels I have. And picking out the stuff I like, putting them together and letting me decide whether ''24'' is on at 9 o'clock or 9:45.

Powell mentions the dark secret that having a TiVo means he watches more (and better) TV, which is something I hear from just about everyone that owns one.

Forbes: Will Networks Survive Digital Technology?

A new article from Forbes "Will Networks Survive Digital Technology?" continues the theme of the earlier Wired article.

An interesting point is made about commercial-skipping technologies like Echostar's DVR and TiVo. Expect to see more product placement in shows and within DVR products themselves. A coca-cola ad hack has an interesting quote:

It is inevitable that technology will give consumers more choices, and that includes when and how many commercials they want to view

Um, is never and zero an acceptable answer? Because that's what your market wants.

Wired 11.10: The Fast-Forward, On-Demand, Network-Smashing Future of Television

The October 2003 issue of Wired features the article "The Fast-Forward, On-Demand, Network-Smashing Future of Television," all about how recent technical advances are changing networks' business models and what the future may hold for them. There's also an interesting sidebar article about a theme covered here again and again: the shaky future of TiVo as a company.

The Morning News: TiVo'd

Joshua Allen's story "TiVo'd" in today's Morning News is an amusing tale of therapy, god-like TiVo power, and the sort of evangelism that most readers here can relate to.

Tivo: First Mover Disadvantage?

There's a challenging piece at Forbes on why Tivo is so loved by it's users and the Tivo community, but how that hasn't translated into mass-market demand for the product and service. Adi Kishore, a media and entertainment analyst for the Yankee Group in Boston, says

"I can't think of any product that has had the satisfaction levels it has had but has been as sluggish in terms of the growth of the market. It's certainly unusual for a product to have this kind of enthusiasm from the community that's using it without being able to tip over and really become a mass-market phenomenon."

Forbes.com: TiVo Sales Remain Tepid Despite Fanatic Fans

Nokia Throws Its Hat Into The PVR Ring

Nokia is the latest company to join the PVR market with their Mediamaster 260 S product.

All the familiar features are there: digital satellite receiver, digital video recording, comes with an 80GB hard drive. But there are some added goodies as well.

Like many of the new PVR's on the market, the Mediamaster has photo album functionality, as well as having a few (albeit hokey) games built-in. It also has smartcard support for various pay TV services.

Perhaps the most intriguing feature is the Bluetooth support. One will be able to take a photo on a Bluetooth enabled camera-phone and upload the image to the Mediamaster for viewing.

However, it appears the device is not yet available in the United States.

Caller ID on your TiVo

Serious tinkerers might like to know there are network based Caller ID Programs out there to bridge the gap between your phone and computing devices, for mac, windows, linux, and even TiVo. The package doesn't look for the faint of heart, requiring file and command-line access to your TiVo, but it's a cool feature I've seen in a lot of satellite receivers and wonder why it's not already in TiVo.

PVRblog ♥s Gizmodo

There's an amazing amount of news worth sharing over at Gizmodo — if you don't already visit that site daily, you really should.

Sony and Dell are coming out with Windows Media Center PCs, hopefully sporting the updated edition of the OS set for release later this month.

And not one, but two different companies have announced TCP/IP aware televisions, with KiSS technology announcing what could possibly be the coolest TV on the planet: a HDTV-capable 42" plasma screen with 802.11g integrated. Toshiba is also working on larger TVs sporting ethernet jacks, including a 42" flat panel too.

Although the 802.11g protocol can theoretically attain network speeds in the 55 Mbps range, real world reports are that reliability and reported speeds are much less than optimal. If I were moving video from a PC to a TV and back, I'd opt for the 100 Mbps ethernet and run wires myself.