Industry

We Are TiVo

"What we found in our market research was that consumers found it awkward to have to manage digital content in two places," said Brodie Keast, a senior vice president at TiVo. "The PC has won as the center of digital content."

The company was surprised by the popularity of 802.11b wireless-based home networks and decided that the best way for TiVo subscribers to access and share digital content was to simply piggyback on wireless networks, Keast said.
— c|net: "TiVo wants to join the home network"

It's nice that they did market research, but don't you think that this is obvious? Consider your address book. Isn't it time-consuming and annoying to keep various bits of contact information in your desktop computer, your phone, your PDA, post-it notes on the refrigerator, and a couple of dead-tree address books? Rather than let the data move smoothly through a general purpose network, it was duplicated and used on multiple special purpose devices. And why? Because each thought it stood alone, the Sun revolving around it.

Let me put it this way: THE NETWORK HAS NO CENTER. The network is. Once you realize that you can see that the trend is toward ubiquity, toward things that live on the general purpose network, speaking to each other regardless of make or model, and which can act on data anywhere: Things which are more like you and I than like that stack of electronic components in your living room.

9:44:07 AM # Google It!
categories: Industry, Media