Coming Soon via Your TiVo: Downloadable Internet Video on Television - New York Times

Link for this post: Coming Soon via Your TiVo: Internet Video on Television - New York Times.

Looks like Tivo is getting into the downloaable movie business along with everyone else ( including MSN Live). Here is an excerpt from the beginning of "Coming Soon via Your TiVo: Internet Video on Television" by Saul Hansel in today's Times.

TiVo plans to introduce features that will allow people to use its digital video recorders to watch some video programming from the Internet on their televisions.Until now, TiVo has not been able to tap into the explosion of Web video — clips uploaded by amateurs and, increasingly, professional segments made for the Internet. The new features, which are set to be announced today and introduced early next year, are intended to change that.

“Video is interesting for a certain segment to see on a laptop or PC,” said Tom Rogers, TiVo’s chief executive. “But for a majority of people, it’s not going to be television until it’s on the TV set.”

Many TiVo recorders have technology that allows them to be connected to the Internet, and 500,000 of them are online through high-speed connections. But TiVo’s recorders use a video format used in DVDs that is known as MPEG2, and not any of the several formats used for online video. TiVo has found several ways around this problem. A handful of producers have agreed to convert some of their programming to MPEG2 and make it available to download directly to TiVo recorders

You can read the rest (with a free Times subscription) at the link at the top of this post..