Zeigen

Vacation day today (although I spent it catching up on e-mail and dealing with a couple of issues). TiVoPony’s post to explain and some nice thoughts from the community over here.

I am very proud to announce the addition of The Onion, America’s Finest News Source, to TiVoCast.

Sign up on your DVR under TiVo Central -> Find Programs -> TiVoCast, or by visiting http://www.tivo.com/tivocast/

This is hard-hitting news, folks. Get informed, and sign up today.

This morning we launched One True Media service on TiVo. This new service lets you very quickly create montages from your photos and video, edit it all together into a video (with music and transitions), and then share your newly created home videos with your friends and family so they can watch it on TV easily via TiVo.

All you have to do to get started is visit One True Media and sign up, upload a few photos, and then tell your friends and family your special code. The One True Media site lets you send out an e-mail with the easy instructions.

It’s always free to download videos shared by your friends and family on to your Series2 or Series3 TiVo DVR connected via broadband, and during the launch period it’s currently free to create and share videos. It only takes a few minutes, check it out!

I think this service has enormous potential. It took me literally seconds to create a fun movie from some photos I had on my laptop, and I downloaded it to my DVR in minutes. I can easily see creating a few new montages each month and automatically sending them to my brothers and parents and relatives who have TiVo.

(If you know me and want to see my first Sammy test video, drop me an e-mail!)

…but no time to say it. Sorry for the radio silence.

Very late night last night (I guess I should say this morning) and very busy day today, as we launched Amazon Unbox on TiVo starting at around 9pm Pacific on Tuesday evening. Got a Series2 or Series3 connected via broadband? Head over to Amazon’s site and rent or buy movies and TV shows. The press release hit at 5am this morning, and our CEO just discussed it during our Q4 results conference call. Now that I’m free to talk about it, I’ll head over to the TiVoCommunity forum and field any questions over there.

I’m very excited about this; it took a lot of hard work, but it’s working really well, and I think it’s great to be able to pick up TV shows that I missed out on, and rent and purchase movies that we missed last year.

Check out the unofficial Amazon Unbox blog as well.

As we launched last night, we were keeping an eye on the blogging community to see who would break the story first. Congrats to MegaZone over at TiVoLovers. We also saw a few eagle-eyed TiVoCommunity forum members post the news, within an hour after launch.

Before I forget — we also just launched an Amazon Previews channel on TiVoCast where you can download (free, natch!) trailers for Amazon Unbox’s new releases that are available for your TiVo DVR. Available now — check it out!

Despite only getting four hours of sleep and running around crazy today, I’m honestly exilharated by the news and being able to offer something of such great value to our subscribers.

Kimi gave me a homework assignment which I’m passing on to you: Read this article, then let me know if you agree or disagree. After a couple of comments I’ll chime in.

I rented the Babel DVD on Saturday (from one of those kiosks at Safeway that Davis is always writing about), and we had Yvonne over tonight to make popcorn and help us watch it. (Thanks Yvonne!)

We switched on subtitles a bit of the way in, and I think I would have been frustrated to see this film in the theatre without subtitles.

I can see why it was nominated for an Oscar, and I’m always happy to see a movie depart from the traditional three-act structure. Brad Pitt almost seems like not Brad Pitt, but the other actors (especially the Moroccan children) deliver braver and more credible performances. Ultimately, I think this movie is less deep than it appears, and really despite the tension it builds has no teeth. Most of the characters in jeopardy don’t have enough screen time to really build up enough empathy.

So you’re left with a non-traditional structure that is interesting, excellent acting and cinematography, some compelling segments and some not so much. Despite the title, I don’t think the language barriers really come into play (with the exception of the Japanese girl’s story). I can already feel this movie leaking away, where, in contrast, I’m still thinking about Pan’s Labyrinth.

Worth the $1.50, but I’m going to go with thumbs down overall.

This is, in my opinion, the second dumbest Survivor decision in Survivor history.

(Spoilers after the break; don’t read if you haven’t seen the Survivor episode from Thursday, March 1st.)

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Check out our new TiVoCast partner, Break.com! They may not be a household name — yet — but I think this is pretty funny in a painful sort of way.

Today is my eighth anniversary at TiVo Inc. Odd to think that I was 31 when I started.

In my time there so far, I’ve worked in two roles (with four different titles), for five different VPs, in two different buildings, with eight different cubicles.

When I started, TiVo had fewer than 70 full time employees. Today there are still many of those (close to twenty, I think) who are still at TiVo, even after eight years. That’s gotta say something.

Even though I had to cheat a bit, I did manage to get a post up for every single day in February. (Cheating? Yeah, I took Harry’s advice and sometimes I posted retroactively a bit, by backdating a post. Mwaahaaa.)

January wasn’t so good, with only 25. But I will add some photos retroactively to bring it up to 31, maybe this weekend. I enjoy blogging, but I’m still trying to work out the best time to do it each day. And as I predicted, there’s a very varied audience here. I’ve got TiVo fans, co-workers, relatives, and friends stopping by, which makes it a bit challenging to hit the right tone. Some people are only interested in TiVo stuff, others only in pictures of Sammy. Ideally I’d split things off into their own blogs, but that seems like too much work to me right now, so I’m going to just keep writing about whatever happens to catch my interest that day. Thanks for hanging out with me in February. If you have feedback for me, let me have it.

We get “March,” by the way, from the Roman month Martius, named for the war god, Mars.