The Sunday Herald has an article on TiVo in the UK.
Mike Ramsay, who relinquished his chief executive post last year but still remains on the board of the Silicon Valley company, told the Sunday Herald that TiVo could return to the UK by having its software embedded into Freeview boxes.TiVo could issue a licence to a Freeview box manufacturer/distributor for its component and then handle the service aspect itself. But although TiVo has been in “lots of discussions” with potential partners, Ramsay said it had yet to strike a deal.
It probably isn’t shocking that TiVo would be talking with set top box makers in other countries. I don’t know how much weight I’d put on Mike’s comments. On the other hand, TiVo now has a working OCAP implementation. (Well, the current implementation is on a ‘precursor to OCAP’, but full OCAP is in the works to support more cable boxes for Comcast and Cox.) OCAP is based on a standard called GEM, or Globally Executable MHP. MHP is the Multimedia Home Platform, which is a standard defined for DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting), which is widely used in Europe. Set top boxes in the UK support DVB and can support GEM/MHP. Because of the common base, it could be possible to port the OCAP software to run on GEM/MHP STBs without excessive effort. I know I said this at some point in the past, that the OCAP port could open a lot of doors for TiVo because of this common ancestry and the widespread use of DVB/MHP/GEM globally.
