RSSPhilips Ready to Enter DVR Market
By Ed Oswald | Published September 4, 2007, 12:39 PM
Philips is preparing a digital video recording system called Personal TV Channel, which could be seen as a competitor to TiVo.
While the device works much like a standard DVR, Philips hopes the way the product determines your preferences will attract consumers. Whereas TiVo Suggestion requires a good deal of input before it works correctly, setup in Philips' DVR is much easier.
All that is needed is one program to begin filling your channel. From there, it watches what you regularly view to populate it with other programming. Multiple channels can be set up for each member of the household, and they can be shared between users.
In addition to pulling content off of cable and satellite, Philips' device also looks for video content through sources such as YouTube and podcasts. The software is available for both PCs and set-top boxes, the company says.
While the set-top version is still likely at least a year away, Windows Vista users can get their hands on the software as a free download beginning next year, Philips said. It also appears that the company will work to have its software included on PCs.
The cost of the service will be offset by its advertising features, which allow commercials in programs to be replaced by ones more relevant to what a consumer may be interested in.
The title of the article is somewhat confusing to me given the fact that my 7 year old TiVo Series 1 box was manufactured by Philips.
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|Can this thing bypass HDCP? Otherwise forget it.
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|Sounds like a superb idea! Monitoring what shows you watch to determine what ones to record later is a feature I can't believe Tivo still doesn't have.
I do smell a lawsuit, though - replacing commercials with different ones? Advertisers will be screaming bloody murder, and rightfully so - they paid to get that ad out, and now it's being replaced. Some might argue "well, you won't watch it anyway because you fast forwarded over it," but the original commercial is still there.
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|I guess you've never had, used, or even seen a TiVo, since the suggestions are exactly what you claim TiVo "still doesn't have." TiVo suggestions are built based on what you watch in addition to what you give thumbs up and thumbs down to.
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|Because Tivo is making such a huge profit and DVRs that are separate from the content providers is a profitable business right now?
Okay, so it's not strictly an all-in-one solution just yet, but hats off to Philips for trying, I guess.
I don't know about others, but even though I was a big fan of Tivo from the two I've had, I never used (actually turned off) their suggestion system. Didn't care how accurate it could be, I knew what I wanted to watch and didn't care to add more junk to the list of crap I already watch. Most people I talked to who don't know the differences between their random DVR and a Tivo thought, "Meh!" of that feature when they heard about it from me.
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|I did turn off the feature that auto recorded the tivo suggestions but I do occasionally browse through the tivo suggestions if I am looking for something else to watch.
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|Turned it off. The suggestion feature is garbage.
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|I loved the suggestion feature too. I found alot of shows with it.
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