It's fascinating to me how the TiVo, which not so long ago looked to be teetering on the verge of extinction along with Aleutian Geese, Northern Spotted Owls and Congressmen who've dealt with Jack Abramoff, has made a partial clawback to viability. TiVo is still announcing as good news things like the fact that they didn't lose as many millions of dollars last quarter as they did the quarter before. But they're also announcing a mess of new features and business relationships that show that the keystone Personal Video Recorder is still in there, punching away against all those new machines people are getting from their local cable companies.
Very shortly, those of us with Series 2 TiVos hooked up to the Internet will have some special pages viewable on our TiVo screens like the Fandango site to check local movie showtimes and purchase tickets or the Yahoo pages for local weather and traffic. Here's a link to a page on the TiVo site which lists the forthcoming features. Obviously, this is redundant for those of us with computers but I somehow like the idea of my TiVo making progress. As long as they keep adding features, I feel like they're still in business.
The feature I'd really like to see TiVo introduce — and I don't know why they haven't — is a piece of software you could have on your computer that would enable you to choose shows to be recorded. You can program your TiVo online but not on your own computer. What I have in mind is software that would download the entire program schedule and allow you to search it or even program it with simple macros — i.e., "Show me all episodes of Saturday Night Live that are on later than 6 PM and which list Dana Carvey but not John Goodman." Or "Automatically record The Late, Late Show any night Late Night with Conan O'Brien is a rerun." Or it could perhaps even build a database of what you've recorded in the past and note if you recorded this week's CSI: Barstow rerun the last time it aired. Something like that. It seems to me this would be very easy for them to do.