PVRblog is reporting that Tivo's HME beta program is rolling out Yahoo Traffic, Yahoo Weather and Yahoo Photos to testers. They're also testing a TiVo podcatcher, although it's unclear whether the feature also supports video podcasts.Podcasting could become popular on TiVo's, even if only audio. But I'm not sure how useful the Yahoo features will be. Yahoo Photos would let you show pictures that are not stored on your PC running the TiVo software, though. As far as the basics like weather and traffic, there are many sources for that kind of information, including your PC, which might be faster to access.
You don't need to be in the beta program to try the HME applications. One place to visit is apps.tv, which has several HME apps you can play with. There are also instructions on how to get it going.
1. I just started playing around with Galleon (http://galleon.sourceforge.net/html/index.html) and it already provides a away to get such content on a TiVO via its own HME apps. It includes: local weather, movie times, RSS feeds, email, pictures (via an RSS Feed I believe), traffic (from Yahoo! actually), in addition to streaming music and pictures from the PC where it is installed. The coolest app is the TivoToGo integration, where you can tell it to automatically download specific programs.
Posted at 2:34PM on Nov 28th 2005 by Oscar Merida