ReplayTVBlog

Is the Tivo Content Download Service coming soon?

According to this post at PVRblog, there was a message recently sent to Tivo owners with an update Tivo privacy policy. Normally, this wouldn’t really mean anything — Tivo already seems to track what everybody is recording and watching and releases those stats to the media, so what other “privacy” could they possibly be invading?

But this time, there was an update that actually might mean something:

For this notification, the updates [to the privacy policy] pertain primarily to the addition of new functionality that will enable TiVo subscribers to download content to their Series2 DVR.

I’m assuming that this means Tivo owners being able to download copyrighted content that they rent — TV Shows, Movies, etc. — and not Tivo owners being able to download their own videos to their Tivo.

Downloading your own videos to your Tivo would be a great feature — this is something that can “kind of” be done already with a ReplayTV and DVArchive. By re-encoding my own video files to the ReplayTV mpeg format and importing these files into DVArchive on my computer, I can then stream my own video from my computer to my ReplayTV. It’s not exactly the same as actually copying the files onto the ReplayTV, but the end result is the same.

If Tivo were to add the ability to actually put your own videos onto the Tivo, That would be a huge advantage for Tivo.

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