AT&T turns cell phones into TV remotes

AT&T said that starting Tuesday, it will allow customers of its Homezone product, a service that offers video-on-demand and other content from the Internet on TVs, to use their mobile handsets to remotely view listings and schedule or delete recordings from their DVR (digital video recorder) set-top boxes. All that is needed is a WAP 2.0-enabled handset that lets subscribers access the AT&T-Yahoo portal.

This is pretty cool – now, what ever happened to the Verizon/TiVo deal that was going to bring a TiVo application to Verizon cell phones? I caught a glimpse of it at CES2006 (it wasn’t being shown, some folks were talking about it where I could see it though), and it was announced later in the year – but it hasn’t appeared.

Personally I’d like to see TiVo make the TiVo Central Online site mobile-friendly – just like Google has done for their search site, Gmail, etc. You don’t need special apps. Though they could also publish an API for the site and then the community could produce their own apps for the different platforms – PalmOS, WinMob, J2ME, etc.

EDIT: Well, ask and you shall receive. I asked about the Verizon-TiVo status, and later in the evening I found (well, Google found and told me about) a couple of articles which claim that the Verizon software will be out next week. Here’s one and here’s the other one.