Broadband Tivo?

[Bliesner]

Does anyone know if Tivo have any plans to introduce an ¨on demand¨ broadband version of the box?

This is the only way I can see that abandoned markets (ie. the UK) could possibly gain access to a Tivo box that is designed to work with newer technologies, such as large screen LCD/Plasma TV's, or even HD.

Apple is effectively moving into this space soon with iTV. Although it won't contain a full O/S etc, it will allow you to remotely access iTunes, which (if you could somehow *cough* get access to the US Store) will give you full, on demand content - and since they have increased the size of the downloads (from an average 80mb per TV episode, to about 500mb now), the quality is of an excellent standard, even on a 42¨ plasma. Of course, Apple charge $1.99 for each download, which adds up.....

Personally, I think the way Apple is going is the future, and that Tivo may be barking up the wrong tree (as much as I love Tivo). In my humble opinion, content is king, and on demand is the future.

NB: for those who are keen, you can essentially get yourself an iTV setup now, by hooking your Mac up to your HD TV via an HDMI cable, and running Front Row (to access your TV/Movie content on iTunes). It works great.

[cwaring]

As far as we know, in the UK at least, Tivo have no plans to introduce any type of new box at all :(

[frogster]

NB: for those who are keen, you can essentially get yourself an iTV setup now, by hooking your Mac up to your HD TV via an HDMI cable, and running Front Row (to access your TV/Movie content on iTunes). It works great.Front Row is rubbish. It can hardly play any content at all and the last time I saw it working (and it doesn't work for long without crashing, in my experience) it still didn't support AC3 sound which must make it the worst media player in history.
Any PC with VLC (free) and a £30 DVI video card and £10 sound card can beat this hands down: you don't even need to use Windows MCE as vanilla XP works fine.

And who in their right mind would actually buy content from iTunes, with all the repressive DRM and proprietary formats that this entails?

If Apple is the future then we are all doomed to own expensive designer boxes that can't actually do anything apart from look pretty, and which can only communicate with other expensive and pretty Apple products. I dread this.