TiVo Heads For iPods, PSPs

Mobile TV is one of those borderline technologies that will soon become as ordinary as, for example, the portable MP3 player. A lot of companies got involved in this area, each of them championing their own technology and devices for supplying such services. And one of this companies is TiVo,[more] who is expanding its video recording service so users will be able to transfer recorded television shows onto Apple Computer Inc.'s iPods or Sony Corp's PlayStation Portable.
According to AP, TiVo has just announced the enhanced TiVoToGo feature, which will make TiVo's services more portable. However, this is also a more secure product because, as TiVo officials said, shows recorded via TiVoToGo will have digital watermarks. The extra encoding will follow the copied program wherever it goes, giving TiVo the ability to trace the origin of a transferred program that might get posted freely onto the Internet.
With its introduction in January of TiVoToGo, the digital video recording pioneer gave its broadband Series2 subscribers the ability to transfer recorded shows to Windows-based PCs and laptops as well as portable media players. But the service was available only to devices compatible with Microsoft Corp.'s Portable Media Center platform, such as Creative Technology Ltd.'s Zen.
Now, by adding support for the MPEG-4 video format, TiVo hopes to capitalize on the popularity of iPods and PSPs, which are among today's hottest handheld gadgets with video capabilities. "There's a lot of flexibility now in the devices we support, and this puts choices in the consumer's hands," said Jim Denney, TiVo's vice president of product marketing.
Of course, this transfers were already possible, but were generally undertaken by people with some tech-hacking abilities. Now, this service is available for everyone, although at a price (not money, but time): the transfer process from a TiVo Series2 set-top-box to a PC, which is a mandatory step before syncing to a portable, occurs roughly in real-time, so an hour-long show will take an hour to transfer to the PC, then roughly another 10 minutes or so to sync to a portable device. Quite a long time, but it's worth it.