TiVo is turning into a platform - for outside services. The company yesterday announced a deal with BrightCove to bring the Internet-based content into your TiVo and playing it back on the big screen. That is interesting and most importantly, critical, development for anyone who has Internet Video ambitions.
Michael Robertson, the founder of MP3.com, and a whole lotta products/projects emailed me to say that his team at MP3Tunes, a digital music service, is working on ways to get your music on to TiVo. On his blog, he writes, “If you have a TiVo, you can use it to play high-quality digital music through your home entertainment system, which is what I’ve done with my own music library. I now have my song collection at my second home without the hassle of moving or updating music files - I just turn on my TV.” In other words, you can stream the music from your digital locker at MP3Tunes straight to your TiVo and pipe it through your home stereo system.
With the deals TiVo has crafted with Yahoo and C/Net, I think TiVo might be onto something. If they got extremely aggressive about their developer program and bring in more third parties into their ecosystem, they could survive the curse of DVR commoditization.
8 comments so far
10:56 AM PT
Essentially there are a bunch of ready-to-use programmable set top boxes out there waiting for internet content.
Still waiting for Netflix on TiVo
11:09 AM PT
I just gave the mp3tunes/Tivo service a shot. Worked great. Finally, a solution like this that doesn’t require running a mini music server in the house.
Here are the instructions to set it up
11:10 AM PT
well, that is good to hear. i wish i could get my home set-up to work. it is such a mess right now. i need to get it cleaned up right now.
i am looking forward to setting up mp3tunes service
11:48 AM PT
I have a Toshiba 120 Tivo box and the free service.
It is currently hooked up wirelessly to my Apple Base Station Extreme. Is there a way to have the Tivo play my iTunes music over the TV? The computer and Tivo are in seperate parts of the house and it would sure be nice.
2:13 PM PT
Lantzn: Galleon may provide what you seek.
Om: yeah, my hard drive crashed the other day and I just had to try some easy way to back things up. I really wanted to be safe and have the backup push to a location outside of my house, and being a Linux user, this service was a nice match.
11:33 AM PT
Lantzn: AudioFaucet is another TiVo HME application that will both stream MP3 files directly to the TiVo and control iTunes to stream audio to an Airport Express unit. It runs on Mac & PC — you can get it at
(link)
Disclaimer: I’m one of the developers of AudioFaucet.
2:07 PM PT
I just tried out my mp3tunes locker on my TiVo and it sorta works but needs more work. I’ve been able to get some music to play but I can’t see my full artist or albums lists (it only shows down to about the Fs for artists) and the application keeps crashing with ‘out of memory’ issues. I have about 40GB of music on their servers so the problems may be due to the size of the locker.
8:31 AM PT
I loved mp3tunes for about a week, until it stopped streaming itunes drm files. That was the point so I could play them on the tivo and at work. oh well, they did have a disclaimer that it wasn’t guaranteed to work or to continue to work.
Leave a Comment