TiVo seeks new ideas from developers

Digital-video recorder company TiVo plans to announce Monday the release of a software development kit that lets third-party application makers add new features to TiVo’s DVR service.

This is some of what they were showing at CES. And before anyone says ‘Sounds like JavaHMO’ – yes, some of the early demos are much like things JavaHMO does. However, *how* it is done is far, far more powerful. Previously you had to fake out the TiVo and serve everything as music or an image, and there was no real interaction. The new API allows full interaction, and the TiVo is just a display system. The first phase allows for many things, like new media players for music/photos which support searching, sorting, etc, not relying on the built in interface. Simple games are possible, etc. And they plan to continue to enhance the API based on feedback. The API/SDK will be open source, available on SourceForge. And the supported language is Java, though I don’t see why someone couldn’t implement the same protocols in another language.