So I was reading the latest issue of Popular Science and on page 15, in “What’s New” there is a one page article on a forthcoming product, the Tight Systems‘ Taz 1. A portable video player with a removable/swappable 60GB HD, 4″ LCD (latest chat on their forums indicates that has changed to a 5″ widescreen display), removable pocket MP3 player that uses SD cards (you can move music to/from the HD), etc. Not bad…
But this is the interesting part:
Tight Systems is working with TiVo to enable video downloading direct from you home media center. While most PVPs require you to do analog recording over RCA cables, with the Taz it will be a matter of hitting the “Export to portable” option on your TiVo menu. Your content will download directly to the Taz’s memory either via Ethernet or USB 2.0.
Well, isn’t *that* interesting? The Taz also won a “Best of Innovations” award at CES 2004. They don’t appear to have mentioned TiVo on their website, but it has come up in their forums (other people have seen the article too) and their CEO has commented that they are in negotiations with TiVo. So this may not happen, but it looks like they’re trying to do it. Here are two threads that the CEO posts in that mention the TiVo deal: first thread, second thread.
If this comes to market it could be very interesting indeed.
