Tuesday, February 1, 2005
TiVo's Home Media Engine Launched
Posted by James Fee in "SOFTWARE" @ 12:00 PM
"As reported at CES earlier this month, TiVo's new developer-friendly package, dubbed Home Media Engine (HME), launches today. I got to chat with Howard Look, VP of TiVo Application Software and User Experience a couple days ago about it, and here are the main points about today's rollout. The Developer Toolkit is available at Sourceforge. The Toolkit includes a sandbox TiVo emulator app you can run on your desktop to test applications against. A developer backdoor password that enables HME (will require that you have the new TiVo 7.1 OS) You can now code simple games, audio applications, video applications, and utilities in Java that will run on your computer and communicate with any TiVo with the backdoor enabled on your network (you can share your code with others if they want to run the apps too). A developer contest has been announced, to award the best apps developed in the next few months. Included sample apps include a simple game, a RSS reader, and a weather app."
This should open up some great possibilities for TiVo, but I'm afraid that time has passed them by. Unless they can get some really imperssive programs, people are still going to gravitate to either cheaper DVRs or MCE.
This should open up some great possibilities for TiVo, but I'm afraid that time has passed them by. Unless they can get some really imperssive programs, people are still going to gravitate to either cheaper DVRs or MCE.
