CES I almost died visiting the Tivo Booth

The last day I spent at CES I had to visit the Tivo Booth. Where the hell is the Tivo booth ?  After consulting the web I found that it was in a private meeting room about as far from any show activity as possible. It’s sad to see your hero’s die.. Did I say that out loud..

So I set out to visit Tivo.. I walked, and walked…..and walked down to room 201 in the north hall. I should have left bread crumbs because I passed the last human about 5 minutes ago.. Wait, there it is..

It was a good size room with several Tivo stations setup. The people were very friendly as they had so few visitors that would walk that far..  They gave me a Tivo bag (the rest of the day people said to me, “Tivo was here ?”) and some nice mints.

Most stuff was rehashes of previous announcements but the two things that were legitimately cool were..

1) The new, unreleased, Tivo Series 3.. It’s a cable baby that’s cable card capable with dual tuners and full HD support. IT allows for external storage. It was cool and just what the company needed 12 months ago. However, I am hopelessly in love with the Tivo so I will wait, and I will buy.

2) The new version of Tivo-to-go that is currently in beta and will release in March will allow you to sync your Video Pod or PSP to your Tivo and watch stuff on-the-go. That is cool.

Here’s my take.. Direct TV accounted for most new Tivo sales. For whatever reason that deal went south and took both of them out for what in the DVR market is a million years. The Comcast DVR is a total piece of shit so Tivo ‘may’ have one more chance with the series 3. My concern is that they may release a new DVR in the partnership with Comcast first on the Motorola platform. At the end of the day Tivo is mostly a good software platform… and that won’t be able to make up for the horrible Motorola hardware.