In keeping with its mission to provide subscribers unprecedented control over their television viewing experience, TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ: TIVO) announced today it will enable TiVo subscribers to easily convert and transfer broadband video from their PC to their television sets. Through an expansion of its Desktop PC software later this year, TiVo subscribers will be able to view videos from the Web on their TVs, even if they are not originally in a format that televisions can display. This is in addition to the broadband programming delivered via TiVo’s TiVoCast direct delivery feature. TiVo, the creator of and leader in television services for digital video recorders (DVRs) , is the first and only DVR to offer this kind of access to broadband video on the television.
It looks like TiVo Desktop Plus 2.4 will be out later this year and it will support auto-transcoding of Internet video formats into MPEG2 for display via the TiVo. There are already some 3rd party tools that do this, but it is nice to see an ‘official’ solution for this since a lot of users aren’t comfortable finding alternative solutions. Of course, the press release talks only about Windows – I do hope the Mac solution finally appears. It has been too long.
