Tuesday, September 28, 2004

TiVo Innovation: RSS, streaming music, and more

Lots of interesting innovation going on in the TiVo community lately. First off, TiVoBlog has a nice interview with the creator of JavaHMO, Leon Nicholls. (For those that don’t recall, JavaHMO is a replacement for the desktop software that connects to your TiVo. I wrote about it back in January.) Version 2.0 will include the ability to read RSS feeds on your TiVo, customize your weather displays, organize images, and play a wider variety of playlists. Sounds like a great upgrade.



Courtesy of the TiVo Community Forum, here are some other cool things folks are doing: streaming air traffic control feeds to their TiVo, getting police and fire scanner streams to play on the TiVo, and perhaps most intriguing (intriguing = RIAA will open up a can of whoop ass on these guys any day now), people are sharing their music collections over the Internet through their TiVos. (If you know the IP address of a TiVo server, you can manually add it through your interface. Once your TiVo “sees” the other box, then you can listen to music served up from that box.)



There are some interesting questions on that last thread about whether this satisfies the “rebroadcast” definition for purposes of copyright infringement. How long before JavaHMO (or something like it) develops a central server that keeps tabs on these sites, so that you can browse a list of shared music collections?

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