TiVo: The anti-cable
: Om Malik started the ball rolling, suggesting what he would do to save TiVo: He'd give away 2 million boxes to get to 5 million customers paying the annuity for what he thinks can become a premium club sold without marketing. Next, George Hotelling at PVRBlog reacts. Then Fred Wilson decides not answer the TiVo call but then imagines what he'd do, which is pretty much what I'd do with a few variatons on his and Om's themes:
1. Turn TiVo into the anti-cable: Let us download, store, organize, and serve media from both cable and -- this is the important part -- the internet. Let us use it for BitTorrents, podcasts, recorded satellite radio shows, recorded broadcast radio shows, MovieLink et al movies, Audible stuff, MP3s, my pictures: anything. Make it a place for my stuff.
2. Release TiVo from the box; store my stuff in the Internet so I can get to it from anywhere, including the den and the bedroom and soon including my mobile phone. Yeah, sure, you'll have fun times with the MPAA and RIAA but by the time they get you into court, the people will be addicted to the freedom and you'll have won. Make it the everywhere gadget, the tomorrow device without the gadget or the device.
3. Forget about getting people to pay for another TV guide. Ask TV Guide: People don't pay for that anymore. That has been my problem with TiVo; that is why I have resisted: I didn't want to pay for a grid, no matter how good it is. But I also understand that selling hardware is not a great business. So follow the Apple example and sell software: The best way to store and serve my stuff and let me do that on the box you sell or on a box I buy (OK, that's more Microsoft, but you get the point: sell the functionality, not the chip). More important, follow the Apple example and sell community (by making it, as Om suggests, an exclusive club): Aggregate the opinions and recommendations, the links and behavior, the Flickrish tags of the TiVo audience so they help me find what I want to watch even better than today's TiVo (or TV Guide) do; when I organize my own media, capture that and share the logic in aggregate with everyone else in the club. Charge a one-time admission for the box or software and the entry into the club (and then charge me for upgrades later, a la Apple).
4. Market yourself as the alternative to cable that does cable and the internet and more, as tomorrow's everything, anywhere, anytime, any way ticket to media freedom.
That's what I'd do.
A place for my stuff
: Marc Canter and I find kismet in a place for my stuff/a digital lifestyle aggregator.
A place for my stuff, cont.
: Today's packed PaidContent has two great items that point to the future of a Place for My Stuff:
: Motorola, Rafat reports, is restarting its iRadio initiative. Here's Motorola's description in the job posting Rafat found:
• Time-slipped & buffered audio – record & store radio/TV audio and play it back at a scheduled time or on-demand. The audio might originate from Satellite radio, AM/FM broadcast, Internet or Cable TV. Imagine listening to your favorite radio/TV show when & where you want to . . . not when it happens to be broadcast!This is what the Place for My Stuff enables: I get my stuff wherever I want, whenever I want, on whatever device I have.
• Pause-Resume – pause audio playback in one domain (person, home or car) and resume it in another. Picture listening to NPR during your commute home, pausing when you reach your garage and resuming where you left off on your home stereo!
• Push-to-Buy – push a button to purchase & download audio to a target destination. Imagine listening to a great new song on a phone or in your car . . . a simple push of a button launches a transaction to purchase a legal, secure digital copy of the song, download it to your home PC and wirelessly stream it to your car and phone when you get home!
Think of it as a Virtual Personal Audio Recorder based on a few building blocks:
• Car – An aftermarket, Bluetooth/802.11 enabled storage capable device or a multi-function head unit
• Home – A multi-media, 802.11 enabled gateway
• Person - A Bluetooth, MP3 & FM capable handset (Cell Phone or iPod)
• Back Office - Client & Server software architecture to enable seamless services
iRadio . . . doing to analog AM/FM broadcast what HBO & PVR did to traditional TV broadcast!
: But until high bandwidth is ubiquitous, this will be accomplished by syncing. See, then, Rafat's World's-Fair-quality demo of a wi-fi car:
"At a table inside Starbucks, Ford executives set up a laptop that had a bunch of MP3 tracks on its hard drive. Inside the [2004 Lincoln Aviator SUV], a prototype Wi-Fi entertainment system from Delphi was built into the dashboard. It had all the regular buttons for AM and FM radio, a CD player and even a Sirius satellite radio receiver. But there was one more: a synchronization button...We pushed it, and in about 20 seconds, some two dozen MP3 files from the laptop inside Starbucks were downloaded to the Delphi radio and stored on a built-in flash memory drive."
A place for my stuff, cont.
: Blogfriend Rex Hammock just sent some amazing links continuing the wishful thinking about getting a place for all my (and your) digital stuff:
: Rex found this remarkable new service made available to every resident of Indiana (finally, a good reason to live there!): SimIndiana gives hooked-up Hoosiers free "word processor, e-mail, contact manager, spreadsheet, personal information manager, and file manager" and -- far more important than that -- a place for all that stuff:
If you create a document in SimWord® (SimIndiana's word processor), you do not have to save it to a disk or to a computer’s hard drive. With SimIndiana, you have the option to save your document in your virtual drive on the SimIndiana server.SimDesk, the company that does this, has a similar deal in Houston. Damn. I want it. Do I have to move to get it?The SimIndiana server is accessible on any computer with an Internet connection. Each user is provided a virtual disk drive on the SimIndiana server where files and folders can be securely stored and shared with other SimIndiana users.
: Rex also sent me the text of a story about a digital Place for My Stuff that he's running in one of his publications soon and with that, a bunch of links, including this one on the Digital Living Network Alliance -- which "established ground rules for building compatible electronic devices that can share movies, music and other media."
But far more fascinating is this link Rex sent for a truly visionary 1945 article by Dr. Vannevar Bush, then director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, in which he envisioned the functionality of computers and, yes, a Place for My Stuff, not to mention the Web and Google:
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory....Welcome to that future.Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.
(My original posts here.)
A place for my stuff, cont.
: Fred Wilson wonders whether Jeremy Zawodny's plan for using lots of gigantic free email accounts is the place for my stuff. Well, it's a start. It proves that storage in the cloud is no problem.
A place for my stuff, cont.
: Fred Wilson continues the dialogue on a place for my stuff: Is it a server in your house or up on the Internet? (My latest posts here and here; Ed Sim's here and here.)
With all due respect to these guys who know a helluva lot more about making successful business than I do, I still want to keep pushing this issue up the ladder to see it from a more strategic viewpoint.
Let's make two (somewhat risky) strategic assumptions:
1. Always-on-everywhere broadband will become ubiquitous soon. See this note on Wi-Fi news with Sprint, AT&T and Cingular fighting over getting high-speed wireless access up soonest. This means that you will be able to get to your stuff from any device anywhere anytime -- even on a plane. Once that happens, it's less important what you store on your device. It's also less important what clients you have; any client can get data from anywhere.
2. The entertainment and technology industries will figure out digital rights management so that you will be able to store your stuff where it's convenient -- whether that's on your iPod or on your TiVo or on your TiVo in the cable cloud. OK, this is an optimistic stretch, but if these industries don't figure it out, they'll be committing murder-suicide. (See lots of DRM coverage from Ernie Miller.)
Once these assumptions come true -- if they do -- you should not worry what device you're using with what clients and what you're storing where. You will want to get to your stuff from anywhere anytime on anything.
That's why storing your stuff in the cloud is preferable.
Short of that, you may want to store your stuff in this device or that -- but that really means you'll want to be able to sync your stuff (which is an opening for a company like FusionOne, which happens to be one of Fred's portfolio companies).
In any case, I won't want to worry about having to get a song or show from this TV to that PVR to that laptop to that video iPod; I will want to either (a) download or stream -- it shouldn't matter if bandwidth is sufficient -- to anything from anywhere anytime or (b) download and sync seamlessly. This still argues for storage in the could, not on a single device I have to install and manage in my home.
A place for my stuff, cont.
: Some reaction to the Place for My Stuff post, below:
: Evil Genius wants it and wants more: sync for contacts and calendars (a la .Mac), RSS information (including what has been read and what hasn't been... Shrook and FeedGator give you pieces of that), and TV and radio preferences to make better recommendations.
: VC Ed Sim doesn't want it all stored on the Internet but on a server in his home, like Mirra, solving privacy and security issues.
I still don't agree because: (1) Consumers won't understand why they should make a capital investment and it will be a hard sell -- witness the trouble TiVo has had getting going. (2) Consumers hate installing anything. (3) A service is more efficient -- it can offer you a terrabyte of storage but no one will use it all. (4) A service can constantly update itself with new software. (5) If the storage sits in the cloud, you can play your stuff on any device in the home -- or anywhere else -- without having to network anything; if you store your stuff on a home-based server in the den, it's not going to be easy to get to yourself from the bedroom TV. (6) It's possible -- possible -- that an in-the-cloud service can deal better with copyright issues. That is, you can store a legal copy of (or link to) a show or song among your stuff in the cloud and play it anytime anywhere and copy it onto limited devices (a la iPod) but not endlessly duplicate and distribute it.
For those last two reasons, cable companies stand well-positioned to provide place-for-my-stuff service. [Full disclosure: I sometimes work with a cable company.] A cable company can serve stuff to your home at high speed from the head-end and elsewhere via the Internet. A cable company will have relationships with entertainment companies and be trusted to hold "copies" of the shows you've bought or rented. But, as I said below, this service could be offered by many other service companies -- AOL, Yahoo, telco -- or software companiesy -- Microsoft -- or a new player.
In any case, I still think this will be a service business, not a hardware business. It will be an essential and big business.
: Fred Wilson didn't respond to the post but he is complaining that BitTorrent is filling up his hard drive rapidly. I left a taunting comment saying that what he needs is a place for his stuff.
: UPDATE: Ed Sim has a response to the response to the response. Go read it.
A place for my stuff
: I want a place on the Internet where I can store all my stuff so I can get to it from anywhere on any device to consume, modify, store, or share. This stuff could be anything -- my movies, music, to-do lists, shopping lists (for the family to update), contacts, documents, search history, bookmarks, photos, preferences, voicemail, anything, everything. And it should come with the functionality necessary to execute all those verbs I listed (e.g., a nice little list-making ap).
I want the ultimate -- in the words of George Carlin -- place for my stuff.
Count on this: It will be a big consumer business. I said below, in the middle of another post, that this could come from phone or cable companies, from Google or Microsoft or Yahoo, or from a new company (VCs: pay attention!). A server for everyone and everyone on a server.
I'm writing this again to highlight it because I see lots of people dancing around this need and desire. See Jason Kottke's smart post about his three wishes for TiVo, inspired by their move into Internet-delivered programming. I agree with two of his wants: He wants TiVo to make better, smarter, categorized recommendations. And he wants TiVo to create community around TV since it is, after all, a social experience.
But I disagree with his third wish: That TiVo becomes the Internet-accessible place for your stuff, complete with that list application. I wonder whether that's not better up in the cloud because (1) you can get to it from anywhere -- even multiple TVs, (2) the storage can be unlimited -- see GMail, and (3) it won't go obsolete. But I agree that I want it, too. Is technology like Christmas: If I hint enough, I'll get it?
: I once worked with a German company called Twest.de that was going to deliver the shopping-list ap and other great little bits that treated the Internet like a life's operating system. Wrong time, wrong platform, wrong VCs, too bad. But now the time has come.