Mexico's Cablevision to Offer TiVo to its Digital Subs

[OLdDog]

http://blog.itvt.com/my_weblog/2006/12/mexicos_cablevi.html

[Justin Thyme]

They don't merely have internationalization support for Euro languages- which is really a simple matter. The problem comes with the head end and STB support for complex glyphs (memory support for large graphics tables, adequate rendering for intelligibility), and probably the most underestimated- coding that assumes Wide characters (double byte encoding or unicode). Worldwide, there is a huge amount of bitty lines of code that assume single byte encoding. It's a pain in the ass to convert over. Anyway, showing Spanish doesn't demonstrate software robustness so much as other languages.

Dig this:
http://static.flickr.com/108/316472770_3baa737764.jpg
Came out last winter-spring. Tivo Greater China is on the mainland now and their goal is 1.5 million users within a year. Anyone have any news on their progress? Charles? You lurking?

Anyway, if Tivo SW can do Chinese, it can do anything. This doesn't demo Bidi support of course, but since rendering while typing is not an issue, it's not that big a deal. Also, I am not sure the Arabic world is ready for a subscription model business run by americans.