TiVo offering CNET video downloads
TiVo and CNET are partnering to provide downloads of CNET video product reviews via broadband connections. If you sign up, you get a 15-minute product review sent to you weekly for the next six weeks.
Currently, you can watch a preview that lasts about 30 seconds. It shows what appear to be snippets of upcoming reviews on digital cameras, TVs, music players and other gadgets. The timing is just right for helping folks choose holidays presents. It's also another demonstration of the features increasingly available to TiVo users who connect to the service via broadband connections.
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. OK let me get this straight. I the person that spent $300 to avoid watching commercials and spends an additional $12.95 a month (for 3 years, yes I should have got the life time membership), am supposed to sit through a 15 minute commercial from cNet?
Yeah, that is going to happen.
3. Joseph I don't think it's aimed at you :)
Posted at 5:40PM on Nov 14th 2005 by Robert Aitchison
4. The TiVo/NetFlix deal is not dead, they're still working together. But it is on hold until the market is more amenable to negotiating distribution deals with the studios. Deals like this could help prove the technology and make the studios more comfortable with it, so it is a good thing.
5. Well, my TiVo finally downloaded it this evening. It showed up in "Now Playing" with a blue dot next to it while it was downloading, and then was put in its own "CNET.com's tech tips and r..." folder when it was done. Didn't seem to interfere with any normal TiVo operations.
Having now watched it (and having formerly watched CNet TV), I gotta say it was pretty lame and very boring. I couldn't even watch the entire 12 minutes in one sitting, it was so tedious, stilted, and devoid of real substance. Very poorly produced, and inexplicably targeted at newbies (even though TiVo users are disproportionately tech-savvy).
Oh, and on top of that, hit the Info button on it and you'll find...
"Restrictions: Due to the policy set by the copyright holder, this recording: Cannot be transferred to VCR, DVD or any other media device. To learn more, visit www.tivo.com/copyprotection."
Excuse me???
Amusingly, however, the "Save to VCR" function still works (I tried it just out of spite), and of course even if it didn't there's no way to prevent anyone from manually dubbing it onto one's VCR (or anything else using analog output).
Weird/annoying/disappointing.
1. Sounds cool but not nearly as cool as the aparently dead Netflix deal (http://www.pvrwire.com/2005/10/20/what-do-netflix-comments-mean-for-tivo/) would have been.
I can't imagine life without TiVo, and it's hard to imagine having TiVo without a broadband. My TiVo has never once been hooked up to a phone line, I even had it using broadband when the software was version 3.2 before broadband was officially supported.
Really what we need is one of the content producers (TV networks or Movie studios) to warm up to the idea enough to at least pilot test it.
If nothing else this C|Net deal is a good proof of concept to show TiVo users what's possible.
Posted at 1:27PM on Nov 14th 2005 by Robert Aitchison