Posted Jan 31, 2005, 8:00 AM ET by Peter Rojas
engadget
TiVo is introducing a software development kit that’ll let anyone create new applications and web services for TiVo boxes.
You won’t actually be able to install the applications directly on your TiVo—it’s more like your TiVo is a thin client and the apps run locally on a PC on your home network or sit on a server somewhere—but some of the different applications that could be possible include streaming music, weather info, RSS readers, etc. and it’s even potentially possible for someone to create a video-on-demand service that could compete with the one TiVo is working on with Netflix. They’re basically making it easier to do a lot of things that people had already hacked their TiVos to do (like view RSS feeds, for example), but given the explosion of plug-ins that are already around for Windows XP Media Center 2005, an SDK was way overdue. Now if we could only convince TiVo to sell a standalone version of their software that runs on PCs (and Macs, of course).