Well...not yet at least. But soon. The entertainment industry has long been at work to remove the ability of a 3rd party, i.e. a company they don't control, to time and space shift content. It's no secret that Hollywood hates Tivo and other DVRs that they don't control. So what is the latest round of digital oppression? I'll tell you but first a story...
I was among the first 100k Tivo subscribers. I know this because when my first Tivo broke and I tried to transfer my lifetime subscription to a new box, the service rep told me. So Tivo and I go way back. When the series 2 came out I was pretty psyched. I loved my Tivo. Then they added wireless support. Great! Then they added the ability to watch one Tivo'd program in another room with a like Tivo so I bought another box. Had them both wirelessly network. But the problem was in the fine print.
Anyone who knows or who has tried this knows that trying to transfer a recorded show over a 11Mb wireless connection is futile. It takes about twice as long to transfer the show as it does to just watch it. This seriously lowered it's value to me. I figured I would just upgrade my network to support G and things would be great....but wait. The physical hardware didn't support USB 2.0 and there was no G software support. It was at this point that HD programming was becoming more and more available and I started getting it at home. Tivo series 2 didn't play well with HD programming. It was at this point that I switched to the Cable Company DVR and said goodbye to Tivo.
You are probably asking yourself "what is the point to this story?" I'm getting there. TivoToGo was a feature added at about the same time as I switched to the Cable DVR. Since I travel a lot, this was a way cool feature but still couldn't get past the network and HD issues with the Series 2.
So when I got the email about the new Tivo Series 3, I was pimped. It looked like it had every feature, connection, connectivity anyone could want...EXCEPT TivoToGo. My gut told me then that it had something to do with the entertainment industry. Why else would you REMOVE features? Then I came across this post from the EFF
here.
The title of this post is "Say Goodbye to Tivo". While this isn't entirely true, it isn't that far fetched either. Tivo's demise isn't going to be that it is a bad product. It isn't that the business model doesn't work. It isn't that people hate it. It isn't that people don't want to buy it. Its demise will come from the entertainment industry in its never-ending attempt to stifle innovation and remove things from the marketplace that they cannot control. TivoToGo is but a warning of times to come. I have been saying this for years along with everyone else. When are people going to start listening and do something about it before it's too late?