Zeigen

I last went to CES in January, 2000 (and there’s a photo of that brave TiVo crew near the front lobby). At that time, our Series1 box had been on the market for less than a year, and version 2 of the software hadn’t shipped yet. No Wishlists, no distinguishing between first run vs. repeats on Season Passes, and none of the advanced features that came later. We were in a deathgrip rivalry against ReplayTV at the time. We didn’t have many employees back then, and about thirty of us went to CES. When we came back, we found out things had been a bit chaotic in our absence. Ever since then I’ve stayed behind to help mind the farm. And truth be told, CES is exhausting, so I haven’t really missed going too much, as much as I enjoy visiting Vegas.

However, I do think it’s scheduled at the worst time of the year imaginable. It’s a lot of work to prepare for CES, and Q4 is always the busiest time of year (not just because of the huge amount of orders that are placed, but also because of budgets and project proposals being due, and almost everyone being on vacation or sick). If you’re on the hook for creating a CES demo, you just can’t relax during the holidays.

To compound the scheduling woes, this year CES occurs at the same time as Macworld. To me that’s just insane. Why splinter the press and attention of the consumer enthusiasts who like both Macs and other gadgets, forcing them to pick between Las Vegas and San Francisco?

Anyway, Apple announced their new iPhone today. Pretty compelling demo (I liked Engadget’s minute-by-minute coverage) and I’m a sucker for iPods (we have three already), but it seems a little big and I don’t like the idea of dialing numbers on a touch screen. Although that Bluetooth headset looks great. $499, hmm. Time for me to talk to the TiVo Rewards team and see if we can add it….

If you’re curious about what TiVo’s announced at CES, check out our press releases:

• TiVo and Comcast (demoing the upcoming TiVo Experience on Comcast cable boxes) — there’s also some great coverage from Megazone over at TiVoLovers, including a lot of photos;
• TiVo and Rhapsody (bringing the Rhapsody music service to broadband-enabled Series2 and Series3 TiVo DVRs);
• TiVo and MusicChoice (adding a great new music content partner to TiVoCast);
• TiVo and Roxio (Mac TiVoToGo, available now) — which I didn’t know about when I made my post mentioning Mac TiVoToGo earlier in the week).

Plus we won an Emmy for our interactive advertising platform!

This entry was posted by Stephen on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 5:52 pm and is filed under TiVo, business, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.