TiVo Mobile Web Site
Last year I was away from home for a few days and I didn’t have my notebook with me, but I did have my iPhone and access to a WiFi hotspot. When I saw a show that I wanted to watch advertised on TV, I really didn’t think much about grabbing my iPhone, heading off to the TiVo site and setting up the show to record on one of the two TiVos at my house. When I got home, I watched the show. More and more of us take this sort of technology for granted. It’s there, it’s functional and we use it daily. But consider going back just a few years ago and the thought of being able to (with nothing more than a phone) schedule your home DVR to record a show that was airing later that night seemed like the sort of thing that we’d only be able to do in the distant future, well the future is now.
I have an iPhone with me nearly everywhere I go, I sync my calendars and address book to it, I check my email on it, I take and send pictures from it and surf the web. On occasion I even make phone calls from it. I genuinely think of it less as a phone than a portable computing device that can also make calls.
Very soon the TiVo Mobile (http://m.tivo.com) web site will be coming out of beta, the team and I spent a lot of time working on this site and it really makes scheduling shows on your TiVo from your cell phone much easier than the full TiVo site. Sure it offers a limited set of functionality compared to the full site, but that’s basically the point. It’s not meant to replace the full site, but rather to augment it for easier scheduling and nothing more. Some folks might be wondering why TiVo opted to go with a mobile web site rather than a full on iPhone application. Well, the answer to that is fairly straightforward, they wanted to make their service accessible to the broadest audience.
In the future there will probably be a genuine iPhone application, but for the time being give the mobile site a try, I’d love to hear your comments on it.
- Snake
