Motorola may not be getting very high marks on the quality of their DVR right now, but there is one area that the company is showing some innovation in and that’s when it comes to multi-room viewing. At a trade show yesterday, Motorola unveiled their Home Media DVR which allows consumers to cut down on the number of set top boxes necessary in the home.
This is exactly how a home media hub should operate and if TiVo isn’t careful they are going to find themselves at a big competitive disadvantage pretty quickly. They need to figure out a way, to not only bring multi-room technology to their series 3 boxes, but to also provide this option without a customer having to purchase a fully functioning TiVo box. Consumers should be able to designate a single area of their home as a media server room for their music, photos & television and then be able to plug in an extender and effortlessly stream it to any television, laptop or computer monitor that they own.
PVR Wire wrote a great piece on ways that TiVo could improve their service and providing a multi-room experience was high on the list. While giving away multi-room viewing without the $6.95 charge would be a hard bullet for TiVo to swallow, PVR Wire rightly points out that Verizon is going to clean their clock if TiVo can’t figure out a better way to compete.
“With services like Verizon’s FiOS TV poised to gobble up this market, TiVo needs to better position themselves to duplicate the service without requiring too big a dip into consumer’s wallets (i.e. multiple subscriptions and multiple TiVos). I’m telling you now, this is a killer application and every hardware PVR solution will be doing it in some capacity in the coming years.”
With Verizon already offering this ability and now Motorola, there will come a time when TiVo won’t be able to get away with charging for multi-room viewing and rather then waiting for IPTV to eat away at the nickel and dimes that TiVo picks up for the service, I’d rather see TiVo charge higher prices for a fully functional TiVo box that incorporates placeshifting, media sharing, multi-room viewing and downloads of any video from the web. TiVo has had a great headstart on the time shifting revolution, but eventually IPTV will become a reality for more then a handful of people and if TiVo can’t figure out a way to match these services, then it’s going to be even harder for them to justify the premium that they have to charge.