IPTV: Yahoo teaming with TiVo.
Check out this interesting piece in The New York Times: Yahoo Plans to Connect Services with TiVo. On November 7th, the two companies announced a plan to integrate their services:
The deal will allow TiVo, which has been struggling to differentiate its service from generic video recorders offered by cable and satellite companies, to offer a range of content and services linked to the Internet.
Conversely, Yahoo is working to move its services from personal computers to other devices, including mobile phones and - by way of devices like TiVo - the television set.
The first fruits of this arrangement are relatively modest: this month, TiVo users will be able to use Yahoo's television listings to find programs and, by checking the appropriate boxes, send instructions to their TiVos to record those shows.
In coming months, TiVo users will be able to view on their televisions pictures that have been stored on the Yahoo Photos site, as well as local weather and traffic information from Yahoo.
Notably absent from the deal is a way for TiVo users to watch video via Yahoo.
There is some strange voodoo afoot here. Connecting your Yahoo account (and your Flickr account too, I might add) to your TiVo could theoretically allow you to purchase content on Yahoo and have it downloaded to your TiVo at home. Again, from the article:
[TiVo's] current digital recorder is capable of viewing programming from the Internet. Indeed, it recently did a test that allowed its users to download movies offered by the Independent Film Channel. "There is more video content that is coming down the broadband pipes," said Tom Rogers, TiVo's chief executive, referring to high-speed connections. He argued that TiVo's technology could be important in helping providers that put programs on the Internet to gain a wider audience.
"People will be much more inclined to watch broadband-delivered video if it shows up on the TV screen," he said, adding that business models for such programming have yet to be worked out.
The article offers more than just a recap of this deal, though – it also touches lightly on the long-running problems of integrating TV and the web as well as the rise of the mobile phone as a third channel for web and video content.
Personally, what I fear is that each of these new competing approaches will segment the market. The new mobisode series 24: The Conspiracy launched in January from Fox, but is only available to Verizon V-CAST customers. Their reported sales percentages out of possible customers are somewhere in the double digits, which seems abominable until you factor in that they're likely considering the "possible customers" to be all Verizon users, instead of the tiny niche market that is 24 fans that use Verizon. I'm afraid that the top brass will write mobisodes and other IPTV experiments off as failures without factoring in this fragmentation. CBS and NBC announcing their episodes will be made available for download on a system other than iTunes is a real setback for Apple; if these companies want to treat IPTV as the viable survival method that it is, they're all going to have to agree on a unified delivery system Until then, it's as if NBC is only delivering their episodes on VHS, ABC is only doing so on Betamax, and CBS is only delivering theirs as DVDs. Something here has to give, or else this super-fragmented market is going to implode.
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