TiVo To Tie Internet To TV

from the onto-the-next-strategy... dept

Just after we wrote about how TV needed to better integrate with broadband services and just as DirecTV sold their entire stake in TiVo in order to build their own competitive offering - TiVo is announcing plans to better tie their service to the internet - letting users download additional content from the internet. There aren't many details so far, but it sounds like they're basically going to copy Akimbo's plan and try to route around broadcasters by letting users download content directly from the internet. While this has some benefits (and it would be cool if they added some broadcatching style features), it also may raise issues. There's still a question about how much viable content there is that would be offered over such a service. Will traditional providers be willing to provide content if they think it may harm their traditional channel? More importantly, broadband providers still don't want people downloading such huge files all the time. Even if it's completely legal, having users constantly downloading video programming may force broadband providers to rethink their offerings and become more aggressive in enforcing usage caps.