Tivo should license their tech to the web space
November 24, 2008
Tivo should license their player/interface/tech to developers to create Flash/Silverlight/JavaFX implementations of Tivo-style playback and record.
I was discussing this with Wayne Sutton the other day, in anticipation of the Youtube Live event. I was watching Wayne speak on a webcam, and there were a group of us text chatting with him, and he was pontificating (as only Wayne can!) about stuff. I mentioned that there’s no Tivo-style interface for web “streaming video” sites. He seemed a bit taken aback at first, then agreed that it would be a good feature to have. He’d said *something* about what time the Youtube event was happening, and I’d missed what he said, but I had *no* way of going back and finding it.
Yes, we do have ‘playback’ *after* an event is streamed (if a producer archives it for streaming) but there’s nothing to let us pause or rewind a live streaming event. Yet we’ve been able to do that in the ‘old fashioned TV’ space for close to 10 years (via Tivo, and now other digital cable set top boxes).
I’ve pretty much 0 idea why this isn’t being done today. I also suspect that any tech that makes it easy to implement that (Flash/Flex, JavaFX, etc) would go a long way towards making that feature a ‘gotta have’, and encouraging migration to that platform to satisfy that demand.
Posted in Uncategorized
November 24th, 2008 at 10:25 am
I don’t know much about how streaming video players are implemented but I’d imagine this would consume a lot of memory (either RAM or disk) in order to store the video as it’s being viewed. Set top boxes are optimized for this task while desktop computers are not.
Still, I agree some easy option for archiving some window of the video stream would be a nice feature. You can probably already “hijack” a video stream with some 3rd party app, similar to Audio Hijack for the Mac (which is AWESOME btw), but it should be built into the player itself, ideally.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:32 am
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Leaked-TiVo-Series3-Specs-Prices-and-Photo-Hit-the-Web-60180.shtml
All I could find on short notice, but a Tivo Series 3 (latest and greatest) has 128M of RAM. That’s it. Yeah, some have larger hard drives, but these are current. Our Tivos from a few year ago probably have something like a 80 gig drive, if that.
The big diff arguably is that there’s dedicated hardware decoders and a ‘regular’ PC wouldn’t have that. The ‘buffering’ feature in a Flash player, for example, could be something that’s only enabled if the player determines the system has adequate speed and resources to do it, imo.
Booting up a Tivo takes a LONG time - usually 5-10 minutes, sometimes longer (just had to reboot the other day). Things like Windows Media Center and MythTV are much much faster, and are dealing with full screen stuff. I’m just talking about the little youtube videos have a buffer/pause/rewind feature. A ’skip back 10 seconds’ would be great too - trying to click back using the slider is awkward at best. Well, we don’t even have sliders to slide in ‘live streaming video’ but if it was buffered, you’d need that if you skipped back.
November 24th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Yeah, no doubt it’s possible to do this, and I agree it’s odd they haven’t done it already. Perhaps there are DRM concerns at play here? Who knows.