PVR Wire

The developer of Galleon, a TiVo HME application that lets you do a whole list of things on your PVR, is calling it quits, saying he hasn't received the kind of third-party support from TiVo that he expects. People rave about Galleon, but, frankly, I've never been able to get it to run on my TiVo. I'll try again soon, but my past experiences ended in frustration.

"I think that TiVo has not done enough to keep my interest in their technology," he wrote on his blog. "I think that they can still do something about improving the situation, but then they have to be committed to really supporting third-party developers. They need to do much more than throwing their SDK over the wall and hoping that something will come of it."

His "hope was that the technology would go somewhere and that TiVo would communicate with third-party developers about their roadmap. Although Galleon is developed as an open source project, it would have been nice if it opened up some commercial opportunities. So, I'm sad to announce that I've decided to reduce my development efforts on the project. I might still release some bug fixes, but these won't be as frequent as the releases in the past. I also don't have any plans on adding any additional functionality to Galleon. I've decided to rather spend my time on other interesting technologies and open source projects."

I was able recently to see a demonstration of Galleon, which is impressive. It's now one of the HME apps you can choose to run on your TiVo Series 2 unit at apps.tv. I've had no problems running the Subscription Manager, which lets you add Yahoo weather, games, a Flicr app and Galleon. The Galleon on there is only an example of what the application can do; you can't change the parameters, so you're seeing the same thing each time you use it. But it's a good way to introduce people to the application, which is now sadly heading into the TiVo sunset.