While I agree TiVo could do more in some areas, there are some things I think you missed.

The TiVo Slide Remote is very nice, I use one. It would be nice if they started including it with the unit instead of selling it as an add-on. More and more devices are shipping with QWERTY remotes – like the Boxee Box. I’d rather have it than voice or motion controls, that’s for sure. I’m not much of a fan of voice controls in general – I can push a button a hell of a lot faster than I can say “TiVo Skip Forward” and navigating menus by voice sounds like a nightmare to me. “TiVo Now Playing, Page Down, Page Down, [Show Title], Page Down, Play [Episode Title]”. And that’s presuming it can understand any given show title or episode title, and that the episode titles were in the guide data in the first place. Voice commands tend to be a poor substitute for a physical remote and their only advantage is in situations where you need to be hands free – like while driving. Gesture controls aren’t that great either – try a room full of friends talking, gesturing, and moving around and see how well it does in a) recognizing commands and b) not getting false positives. Voice and gesture controls are an attention grabbing gimmick, but how many people are really using them to control their Xbox’s video playback instead of a physic remote? And how many get tired of the novelty of it and go back to the remote for simplicity and reliability?

You criticized TiVo’s remote options and talk about other platforms remote apps, but didn’t mention TiVo’s iPad app which is paired with the current model, the TiVo Premiere. They’ve also announced ‘limited support’ for the Series3 and TiVo HD will be coming to the app as well. You only mention the iPad app later, in another context – why? And there are already 3rd party options – i.TV for iOS devices https://i.tv/ and TiVoRemote for Android https://market.android.com/details?id=com.timhoeck.android.tivoremote are the big ones. There’s a TiVo Remote for PCs: https://github.com/wmcbrine/tivoremote Yes, it would be nice for TiVo to release official Android and iOS apps for smartphones & devices other than the iPad, and I think they will, but for now there are options. There is also http://m.tivo.com/ for mobile devices to schedule recordings, etc.

I disagree with your premise about missing the train. The vast majority of users are *not* ‘cutting the cord’ – cable and satellite still dominate. The majority of content available on cable is still not available on broadband – Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, etc. It isn’t a replacement yet, and doesn’t look like it will be for some time to come. But TiVo is already well placed with Amazon VOD, Netflix, Blockbuster, YouTube, Music Choice, web videos, and more – with Amazon Prime streaming and Hulu Plus in the pipeline. Plus Pandora, Live365, Rhapsody, etc., for music. They certainly could improve – I’d like to see better RSS support so we can add *any* (compatible) video blog feed and have it auto-download (right now you can subscribe to any compatible feed, but still have to manually check for new episodes and stream them – no auto-downloads). But TiVo has one of the most comprehensive selections of video providers out there. Considering Amazon streaming and Hulu Plus are in the works, they’re really only missing Vudu and iTunes – and the latter isn’t going to happen with Apple’s policies. They like keeping iTunes locked into their own HW.

I do agree that TiVo should, and could, do more to foster an ecosystem of 3rd party developers. Even the remote apps I mentioned above are based on reverse engineered protocols since TiVo doesn’t publish them. I would like to see TiVo publish the specifications for their network features – TiVoToGo transfers, network remote control, the more advanced features in the iPad app, etc. Much of this has been reverse engineered, sure, but having officially published protocols would give developers a firmer foundation to work from.

As for apps – TiVo tried once before with the Java-based Home Media Engine, or HME. HME started off promising with TiVo supporting 3rd party developers and sites like Apps.tv springing up, and apps like Galleon.tv, AudioFaucet, etc. But then TiVo’s management changed and they seemed to pull back from supporting 3rd parties. A lot of promised HME improvements never hit, and the published API went stale. TiVo didn’t abandon it – quite the opposite, they kept developing it and used it for lots of internal development – Netflix, Amazon, TiVo Search, YouTube, etc., are all implemented on HME. But it was all kept internal and without new features or developer support the 3rd party developers mostly moved on. I think this was one of TiVo’s big mistakes.

At this point HME is really out of date, so I don’t think it is worth reviving. (Though I wouldn’t complain if they published an updated API, there is still some interest out there.) The new HD UI on the TiVo Premiere is Flash-based, and that seems to be the way TiVo is headed. The Virgin Media TiVo in the UK already has ‘apps’, written in Flash, for things like BBC iPlayer, Twitter, and eBay. The same kind of apps have been mentioned in press releases for US deals, including Facebook support, so we’ll probably see the same on the Premiere here. But it still looks like these aren’t truly open to 3rd party developers, just cherry picked partner sites or those TiVo see an advantage in supporting. Hopefully they will truly open it up to 3rd party developers with some kind of ‘app store’ once they get the kinks worked out.

I’ve said for years that TiVo should create an ecosystem and stop being such a walled garden. They seem to be squeamish about the kind of content they allow, etc., so they’re reluctant to open up their video streaming to any site. I say implement decent controls (like their KidZone system) and setup an API toll-road. Allow any 3rd party video site to use TiVo as a client, but collect some fee for the privilege. If the user wants it, let them have it – and make money off of them. Same for apps – follow the Apple/Google model and let developers sell apps, and take a percentage.

At the same time I don’t think the UI needs a major re-invention. I think the HD UI on the Premiere is a nice improvement – familiar for existing users and still new. I don’t think the interfaces on other platforms, such as Roku, the PS3, Google TV, etc., are superior. They do somethings better, TiVo does some things better – but much of it comes down to personal preference. I think the TiVo UI is well designed for its purpose, I certainly don’t think it feels bloated. The only real gripes are that the HD UI isn’t ‘complete’ and the Premiere still falls back to the SD UI at times, and they need to get the second CPU core activated to speed things up. I think the new UI is a nice improvement as it brings more things ‘up’ – taking fewer clicks to get to what you want. The ‘two pane’ navigation works well and takes advantage of 16:9 HD displays nicely.

As for the interface to 3rd party services – a lot of that comes from the 3rd party services. They all have requirements on what the UI to their services can look like, as well as basic issues such as what their API supports. Now, in some cases TiVo is just behind the times – they really need to update their Netflix app for example. When they launched it was leading edge, but since then Netflix has enabled more 3rd party features, like searching for films and adding them to you streaming queue, which are still missing from TiVo’s UI – but present on other platforms. They’ve allowed the UI to go stale. But, in general, the style of the UI is in line with what you find on other platforms. I don’t see a lot of variation between, say, Netflix on my PS3 and Netflix on my Roku. You can even see commonality with Netflix on the TiVo, though the TiVo version does look more dated now. So there are limits to what TiVo can do on blending them into the UI. They still do a lot – like including the streaming services in search results, etc.

I don’t know that we’ll see web browsing any time soon. The CPU in the Premiere is only a dual-core 300MHz MIPS system. While it has dedicated HW for Flash as well as audio & video decoding, that’s still fairly weak – today it is only running as a single-core system to boot. Even today’s low-end smartphones tend to have 600MHz+ ARM-core chips, with the high end up at dual-core 1.2GHz chips. While the TiVo hardware certainly *could* do web browsing, I’m not sure how satisfactory the experience would be. And I think it’d be worse to do it, and have it be painfully slow – or only partially functional – than not doing it at all. How many people *really* want to browse the open web from their TiVo? For specific content they’re probably better off baking support into the OS or writing site-specific apps optimized for the HW and user experience. As a geek, sure, I’d love to see them get a WebKit browser on there, or even embedded Opera, but I’d rather see TiVo take care of other things first.

On social networking I’m totally with you. TiVo recently posted a survey via Facebook about social networking: https://www.facebook.com/TiVo/posts/106023069481876 In my reply I left this comment:
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Let us *automatically* sync our Season Passes and Auto-Record Wishlists to Facebook and share them with friends – don’t make us maintain a separate list on FB.

Let us recommend shows to FB friends that they can accept and have it automatically setup a recording on their TiVo. You can have it set to manually approve recommendations, or auto-accept all of them. I see these slotting it just above TiVo Suggestions – they only record if nothing else is recording, just like TiVo Suggestions. They delete second – after all TiVo Suggestions are deleted these are deleted. And should have their own ‘Friend’s Suggestions’ group in the NPL.

Let us rate/recommend shows right from the TiVo and have it update our Walls. Even include comments – I could see this helping to sell a few Slide Remotes. ;-)

Not directly FB related, but how about integrating support for Miso? https://gomiso.com/ (I don’t use it, but I see a lot of Wall posts from people who do. If I could do it from my TiVo, I might.)

Let me setup special groups of friends, etc, such that our tastes influence each other’s TiVo Suggestions. Or maybe this would be yet another grouping – Hive Mind Suggestions, as it were. So say I have a bunch of anime fan friends, we pool as a group and then the shows they like are more likely to be recorded as Suggestions on my TiVo, and on their TiVos. Basically adding ‘weight’ to their thumb ratings above the general anonymous masses.

Going *way* out there, how about something like Sling’s still born ‘Clip & Sling’ functionality where we can mark a section of a show while watching on our TiVos, then post that clip with a comment. If uploading the video, or otherwise getting the clip, is too much, maybe it offers a link where they can have the same clip highlighted on their TiVo if they have the episode recorded. This would be useful for fans of s show who want to discuss it. Again, sell those TiVo Slide Remotes. ;-)

Offer an easy way to create ‘Record this episode’ or ‘Create a Season Pass’ links for people to use in comments – as well as on fan pages for shows, etc. Synergy, if you’ll forgive me.

Oh – Idea for a browser plug-in – ‘Send To TiVo’! When you see a video online that you like it’d let you tell your TiVo at home to download the video and have it waiting for you to watch on the big screen. It wouldn’t work with all videos, but most of them should work with today’s TiVos. This would be more useful as a plug-in for Chrome, Firefox, etc, as it’d work on any site, not just sites you convince to add some button for this, etc.

But the basic ability to update FB status and/or tweet about the show I’m watching (again, nice Slide Remote right here, waiting), while I’m watching it, would probably be what I used most.
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I think there is a *lot* TiVo could do to build a real user community, aside from the hardcore users who bother with TiVo Community, etc., I mean just casual TiVo users who would be drawn into ‘casual’ social networking by such features, and increase their emotional attachment to TiVo as a platform. It would discourage people from leaving TiVo, while encouraging them to pull in more friends – just like Facebook, et al.

The cloud is a sticky situation – as for uploading content to the cloud, forget about it. HUGE difference between TiVo and Amazon Cloud Player – with the latter you *own* the content, with TiVo you do not. Note that TiVoToGo is increasingly restricted as cable MSOs copy protect flag more and more content. And even when you can use TTG the content is *officially* encrypted and you can only transcode to other devices if allowed. (The reality is that’s been reverse-engineered and you can rip the DRM off TTG shows, but that’s the official story.) There’s no way TiVo could get away with allowing users to put content up on the web to access from other devices, they’d get sued into oblivion – like ReplayTV did for their Internet sharing feature. So that’s a non-starter. Content providers want you to use sites like Hulu, Netflix, etc., to get the content – since they can sell it to you again.

Now, placeshifting by streaming – ala Slingbox – is a different story. There is no ‘copy’ and the ‘original’ stays as-is – that’s how Sling gets away with it. As well as Hava, Windows Media Center, Orb, and other placeshifting products. Unless it is a well kept secret, current TiVo HW can’t do this. TiVo content is MPEG2 – that’s what’s used by ATSC & digital cable, and TiVo locally encodes analog cable to MPEG2 as well. MPEG2 is a non-starter for non-local streaming – most mobile devices don’t have MPEG2 decoding, they have MPEG4/H.264 decoding. Besides, MPEG2 is a less efficient encoding – rule of thumb is you need at least twice the bandwidth for the same image quality as H.264, and in the real world the ratio is generally worse. So you want to transcode to H.264 before streaming – and the TiVo doesn’t have that HW. So we’re looking at a new TiVo, or some kind of (USB?) add-on. It can be done – note EchoStar/Sling make such a USB add-on for the DISH Network 722 model DVR. And the 922 is ‘SlingLoaded’ with placeshifting builtin. EchoStar also just started selling a ‘SlingLoaded’ standalone DVR in the UK. I would like to see TiVo do this, I think placeshifting is one area they can still innovate – and it would pair well with their iPad app, and any forthcoming iPhone & Android apps. (In the meantime I have a Slingbox.)

I couldn’t agree more about DLNA. We know TiVo is preparing streaming within the home to secondary, non-DVR TiVo boxes – and maybe to other devices that could handle the high-bandwidth MPEG2 streams, who knows – but I wish they’d just go with DLNA. DTCP-IP is already endorsed to handle DRM issues over DLNA, and it would allow any number of DLAN-compatible devices to become TiVo streaming ‘clients’. Conversely making the TiVo a DLNA client would allow it to access any DLNA media server, without any need to install things like TiVo Desktop.

TiVo Desktop itself is really a sad piece of software – third party apps like pyTiVo, Steambaby, and kmttg provide better features. TiVo Desktop only copies videos from a PC to the TiVo – why not stream them? Current TiVos can handle H.264 streams, not just MPEG2, but TiVo Desktop insists on transcoding them. A lot of this stuff is fairly simple, and it is sad that 3rd party apps have had support for a long time while TiVo Desktop still does not.

First off, good article. I love seeing the vision of what “could be”!
Although some of the items listed above have changed with recent updates to the software, there are still some “opportunities” for the TiVo Premiere. Personally, I have two units and LOVE them, but I also have a vision and hope they get there one day.
One thing I did recently learn is that you CAN set programs to auto-download from Amazon to your TiVo unit. I couldn’t find instructions anywhere on the web, so I made my own. Check it out:
http://j.mp/startmypc216