Sling vs. TiVo

Why doesn't TiVo release a software update that does what the Slingbox does? If you think about it, a TiVo with a broadband connection basically is a Slingbox minus the software. This is interesting because TiVo has been dragged down through the mud by all the legacy media companies making them an old-school company already! And companies like Sling are leapfrogging them just the way TiVo was leapfrogging 7 years ago. TiVo either needs to make things like this happen or they need to license their interface for cheap. Those are basically their only options these days. Sling looks like the company doing what everyone wants. Think about it, they leapfrog Sprint's TV offering before Sprint's TV offering is even out! Unbelievable.

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Comments (4)

Jim Kelly from Durham, NC, USA

I agree. Free tivo software for the world

MegaZone from .worcester.ma.us

It is more than software, it takes hardware to do what the Slingbox does. And TiVo systems do not have the required hardware. Sure, you can do it in software - IF you have powerful enough generic hardware (CPU/RAM). Orb does it on a PC, in software. The TiVo doesn't have that either.

The Slingbox has a hardware encoder that encodes the video in a stream tailored for the client. So the resolution and bitrate are optimized to make the best use of the connection, without overloading it. And it can adjust the encoding in realtime if the connection quality changes.

The TiVo doesn't have that kind of hardware. It does have a hardware encoder, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 only, and it isn't accessible to transcode previously encoded MPEG-2 content on the drive, only fresh A/V input. The CPU is only 200MHz MIPS with 32MB RAM, not enough to do it in software even close to realtime - not to mention everything else the TiVo can be doing at the time.

You can transfer video from a TiVo over the Internet if you make ports 80 and 443 visable to the client, and point a web browser at https://the-IP-of-your-TiVo. The username is 'tivo' and the password is your MAK (Media Access Key). I've pulled video off a TiVo across the Internet, but it won't happen in realtime unless you have a VERY fat pipe for uploads from home. That's why the Slingbox is custom designed for what it does - it uses more efficient codecs and drops the resolution and bitrate as required. No sense in encoding something 480x480 if the display is a phone with a 240x240 screen.

Anders from RTP

True, the TiVo can't do it in hardware with TiVos that are already deployed. But what if there was a background process that took all the MPEG2 content and re-encoded it into MPEG4 using idle CPU cycles. Streaming this low bitrate alternative wouldn't be a big deal. I have shown how you can download and transcode shows off of a TiVo into MPEG4 using free unix tools, so the only difference here would be that the process would run on the TiVo instead of some external Linux system. Chances are one could cross-compile ffmpeg and do this on a TiVo without TiVo's involvement. Of course, in that case the only thing missing would be a nice TiVo-ish interface.

TiVo should do this. Where's the leadership? And for that matter, if you're transcoding it, why not serve a simple RSS feed from your TiVo that has all your shows in video podcast format so you could subscribe to it in iTunes and get your TiVo shows automatically onto your iPod? Why wouldn't everyone with a video iPod want that?! It's not like it's hard to do! I show how to do exactly that with the link above. The drawback would be that the iPod / Sling versions of your shows wouldn't be available realtime on legacy TiVo hardware, but I don't thik of this as a big deal. It's actually a nice opportunity for ToVo to upsell a box with a faster processor and more RAM. (and HDTV, but I digress)

Thanks for the comment.

Anders from RTP

I guess my point should be "Why doesn't TiVo do this in their next hardware release?" You can hack around it in software, but it shouldn't be prohibitively more expensive to do it with the next rev of TiVo hardware. The more I think about this, the more I think they will. They are already on the iPod / PSP bandwagon, so they have to be thinking about alternative ways to view content. Why not on a mobile device or a remote computer? Many times I won't even bother to turn my video system on. I'll just hit my Sling with my laptop over my home network.