your Tivo and you March 17, 2006 1 comment
I’ve been using tv.yahoo.com since they offered the option to record directly to Tivo, more so than the Tivo interface itself mainly because I’m in front of a computer a lot more than my television. The interface is simple enough. Search for a TV show, click “add to my Tivo”, select some options (record no matter what or record if there’s no conflict) and you’re done. Your Tivo then emails you telling you the status of the recording. It’s quite a useful system and I don’t see why you’d ever use one of those free DVR services that leave out the connection to the internet altogether.
I’ve recently been trying out some other sites where you can manage your television viewing. First there’s cozmoTV (reviewed here). The next version of cozmo sounds much more promising than their current offering. In the meantime it does provide the option to record directly to your Tivo, and shows you what programs have been approved by your Tivo and are officially set to record. Despite some buttons that appear to be clickable when in fact they are not, and the 100% Flash interface, cozmo is still fairly usable and you can record a show in a few simple steps. The largest problem is there’s currently no way to view what’s on TV by time or by channel. It’s genre and personal ratings driven. Drama, Comedy, Action, etc. I never use genres and find this method of looking for shows a bit cumbersome. The only other method is through the search box, which is only useful if you know exactly what it is you’re looking for. After the system knows what you like (by rating programs), perhaps the guide will improve.
Then there’s Evoke TV (reviewd on pvrblog). By the way, why are these people shying away from .tv domains? At the moment there’s no record to Tivo functionality (can’t this been solved with a greasemonkey script) but I do like the idea of the outputted info. A simple RSS feed that shows me what I have upcoming (& what my friends are watching) is nice, although one directly from my Tivo would be more accurate. Currently to have a show show up in your “schedule” you need to rate it, which also might not be the best method. Just because I’m rating it doesn’t mean I’m going to watch it. Evoke really needs the record to Tivo functionality to be a player in this space. I do prefer using a non-flash interface to Cozmo’s.
Evoke’s grid suffers from some of the same problems as Tivo’s recently revamped online scheduling does. To jump hours ahead you need to click little arrows several times, then if you schedule or in Evoke’s case, rate a show, the grid jumps back to the current hour. Tivo online’s channel customization is a little nicer than Evoke’s, allowing you to turn off certain types of sports, or all childrens programming for example. Evoke needs to be customized on a per channel basis.
Wow, I’ve just spent entirely too much time on all of these sites. I’m leaning towards Cozmo TV a bit more than the others for its actual Tivo interaction; but be sure to keep an eye on Evoke for some important updates that have the potential to win me over.
Alex Rowland #
Thanks for spending the time on the review. We’re delighted to get the feedback.
We’ve been compiling a list of to dos for a version 1.1 that we’d like to release by April. High on that list is providing mechanisms to sort shows within a category by title, time and rating. More nuanced show organization will follow as quickly as we are able to implement the changes. We feel that show navigation is one of the areas where CozmoTV can improve most significantly and, fortunately, relatively quickly.
We’ve also been considering the possibility of moving to an Ajax front end. I think this would certainly speed the initial page load. What we sacrifice with Ajax (among other things) is consistent implementation across all browsers. I think this makes Ajax more expensive to develop than Flash, especially at pending license prices.
We’d like to hear as much as possible about what you would like to see in future versions.