Saturday, March 03, 2007

The story of Tino Cancelling Tivo

I came across a funny post by Tino today about his experience cancelling his Tivo subscription. He's leaving Tivo for BeyondTV mostly to eliminate the subscription fees. The funny part is where he describes his experience of the Tivo rep trying to persuade him to violate the DMCA and TiVo's wishes by decrypting files without TiVoToGo in order to keep him as a customer.

It's a great example of how DMCA and copy protection rules hurt the end user and in the end companies trying to survive.

Read the story here.

Friday, March 02, 2007

BeyondTV In Game Room


Originally uploaded by Player_One.
A guy under the flickr name of "Player One" has uploaded some intriguing photos of his game room setup that includes Beyond TV on a 100" Draper screen. More photos can be found HERE

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Snapstream's new TV Listings Web Site - Couchville

Snapstream released their public beta for the project formerly known as Project Columbus. They have renamed the project Couchville.com and it is open for all to try out. Their site says "Couchville aims to be the simplest place for TV listings on the web". The site uses a click-and-drag web interface to navigate the tv guide, it allows you to customize the guide to your liking as well as search for shows etc. Snapstream is also leveraging their statistics page called "BTV Buzz" which lists the top recorded shows for the day, and past week based on the BeyondTV Coummunity.The plan seems to be to make this site a community-oriented TV Listing and information site that might eventually link into many PVR programs. It currently does not link to BeyondTV, but they have this on their help page: "Eventually, we hope to extend Couchville to work with all brands of DVRs and TV devices"

In the snapstream forums, there have been lots of ideas on how to improve the couchville site:



  • Integrate with BTV ASAP and replace ss.net
  • Multiple Inputs (if you have different lineups etc)
  • Add more community-based stuff that lends itself to user blogs etc.
  • Make the BTVBuzz more usefull - feeds etc. Add ability for BTV users to see and use their own tv show rss feeds - listing of shows recorded, shows to be recorded etc.
  • Some day integrate with online video sources like joost and others
  • Its own forums, tv blog, links to wiki's etc. - think meevee.com or tv.com
  • Share your profile of favorite shows or top ranked shows etc like evoketv.com used to.
  • Show ranking similar to TVTome
  • community forums and more database linking
  • Mobile Version to work with phones, PDA's etc.
  • Series and episode info
  • Notices of upcoming pilot episodes & new seasons starting
  • Ability to use the PC Mouse wheel to scroll up and down on the guide
  • Scroll bar support
  • Needs the features of snapstream.net for filtering by channel, type, etc
  • Pay Per View data

You can check out the site at http://couchville.com/

Here's a screen-shot of the site: