The winning answer was we were naming the next TV. I thought it should be as close as possible to what people would find familiar so it must contain T and V. I started looking at letter combinations and pretty quickly settled on TiVo. I also liked that “i” and “o” were a part of the name from the “in and out” engineering acronym. Additionally I thought “vo” had a nice connection to “vox” and “voce” from the latin for vocal sound and Italian for voice, vote and vow are part of the same root words. In a way, every selection one makes with TiVo is a kind of vote. It was all beginning to make some sense. We created a beginning lexicon of TiVo expressions to help create what we anticipated would be a TiVo culture. One of the expressions was “TiVolution”. I liked the similarity of sound to the rock band DEVO and their devolution stance.
Seven Questions with Michael Cronan, designer and creator of the name “Tivo” and the mascot
Tag: television
-
Origins of the “TiVo” moniker
-
What would you do with unlimited bandwidth?
If you’re Time Warner/AOL, you’d use it to clean out your attic and broadcast re-runs. Actually, that’s not quite accurate as they’re going to ask folks to participate in a peer-to-peer network to access the video files. AOL and peer-to-peer, that’s not a union I would have imagined but a new dawn is upon us.
I’m not quite sure what to make of this move. It’s great that they’re serving up all this old stuff (much to the chagrin of established actors and actresses who’d rather we forget their early appearences on Kung Fu) but it all seems tentative to me.
The company will offer a changing selection of several hundred episodes each month, rather than providing continuous access to all the episodes in a series, Mr. Frankel said, so as not to cannibalize potential DVD sales of old TV shows.
This breaks a cardinal rule in my book. If you’re going to take advantage of the amplification effects of the internet (you know, the Long Tail stuff), you need provide a permalink to this content. If you keep changing the lineup, that’s never going to happen.
Why not even go a step further and free this stuff up as source material for mashups as the BBC has done? I would gladly watch an episode of Welcome Back Kotter if someone dubbed in muppet voices and a Shakesperian plot line. Yes, I’ll even watch the advertisements.
-
Yahoo to connect to TiVo
Via the New York Times, Yahoo and TiVo announce that TiVo users will soon be able to access Yahoo information (Weather, Traffic) and Yahoo users will have shortcut to their TiVo from their personalized Yahoo television listings.. (I just checked and the link to add to your TiVo’s To Do recording list is already there!) I’ve been playing around with watching video clips that come through an RSS feed running off of Yahoo Video Search – it’d be cool to get this feed’s content piped into my TiVo. The TiVo’s remote is so much better suited for watching video than my laptop’s trackpad!
-
KRON TV blogger meetup
On Saturday, I headed over to check out the KRON4 Blogger Meetup. I was not sure what to expect but who could turn down the offer of free food and interesting conversation? I think all of us there would agree that we would have liked to have more structure to the afternoon but KRON achieved its objective to introduce themselves as the first local TV station to "get it" and break down the wall between Big Media and the grassroots movement that local bloggers represent. Terry Heaton, the televsion consultant who launched the collaboration between bloggers and Nashville television station WKRN, is working with sister station KRON4 here in San Francisco to blend the hyper-local snippets of local bloggers into their news. Terry’s efforts in Nashville have resulted in the very well received, Nashville is Talking aggregator site,
I think Terry summed up their motives best when he said, (I paraphrase) "We don’t want to dictate from above but support from underneath." KRON has already committed to building their own aggregator of local blogs and Terry said that KRON will be inviting selected bloggers on television to share their views of local events. If KRON follows the WKRN lead, we’ll see KRON supporting selected local bloggers with ads and sponsorship and more get togethers & conferences.
My favortite comment of the afternoon? Being introduced by Terry to the General Manager of KRON, Mark Antonitis, "Hey Mark, here’s Six Apart, these guys are like the NTSC of the blogging world."
-
Google Video Search
Google Labs just announced that they are now providing a video search engine. Details in a BBC article here. This is slightly different than the video search announced by Yahoo earlier in that is indexes the closed caption content provided with television shows and returns results that show where in television segment the search terms were spoken and then shows a screen capture from that segment.
For an example, here’s a persistent search showing mentions of the word blogs.
It’s still in the labs so the actual video footage is not available but if they do point to when the show aired and when you might be able to catch the segment again. If Google delivers on what they are writing about, this could be a version of Google acting as a gigantic, internet-enabled TiVo for the rest of us.
More detail with screenshots here on the about page.
UPDATE: According to CNet, Yahoo has been working on a similar index of closed caption video text of Bloomberg and BBC programs in their partnership with TVeyes. The article also mentions Blinkx but I couldn’t get it to pull up any meaningful results.
-
TV while-u-wait
While filling up on gas on the way to Tahoe the other weekend, I noticed that they had managed to pipe in CNBC business news into the little LCD monitor on the gas pump. Caught up on the latest market news while I topped up the tank.
Ubiquitous sound bite TV and cell phone browsing fills up every spare moment of down time in the quest for the fully productive lifestyle.
-
Cold Snap – News at 10!
Izumi and I had a laugh at the news this evening. They top story was the cold weather we’ve been having with the mercury dropping (egads!) to the 40’s. The newscast went on for the next 10 minutes talking to people that were complaining or wondering how to keep warm. Throw on a sweater! Wear a hat!
People would freak if they ever had to scrape frost of their windsheild in the morning or, god forbid, it snowed!
-
Crazy Weather, Man
Watched an entertaining report from a CNN weatherman “reporting live from the eye of Hurricane Ivan” as he tried to hold an intelligent conversation while holding himself up with one hand on a rail and another on his microphone. He kept getting swept off camera with cries of, “whoa bessy” and then clawing himself back on screen to continue his live coverage as the forces of nature stormed around him. Emergency staff had been ordered off the street but here was this poor fellow, wiping his eyes from the stinging rain, pant legs flapping madly, desperate to bring us this the latest news which basically was – he should get the hell indoors. My question to CNN is, does he get hazard pay for his report?
-
Fuhghet-about-it
The phrase is from a note sent to my father who, after living over 25 years in Japan, is amazed at the overt confidence of the advertising he sees on video tapes I send him from America. If you think corporate American advertising is overt, you should see New Jersey!
The difference between the East Coast and West Coast is dramatic but at least you know what you’re dealing with here. “Have a nice day!” on the East Coast may be rare but at least they mean it. On the West Coast it could be code for, “Get lost!”
On the flip side, people here are always trying to dig at you just to let you know they’re paying attention. Wear the wrong shirt to work and you’ll hear about it for weeks. I still haven’t worked up the nerve to bring out the Oxford given to me by Izumi with the embroidered Mickey Mouse silhouette since the last time – good grief!
Yes, American culture is certainly more confident, even more so in NJ where I have learned the expression “bustin’ your chops” which means what someone just said to you may have been a total dig, really inexcusable, and perhaps even offensive but they said it anyway as a sign of affection and endearment.
I just finished watching the third season of The Sopranos and the tension between truth, dare, and humor keeps that show humming along a dramatic thin line where you never know when someone’s going to take it too far and all hell breaks loose. Takes issues like I’ve discussed above to the nth level and then shines a spotlight on them to see what melts. Great television.