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Yahoo! and TiVo tie the TV knot
Content sharing on the way?

By Michael Singer

Published: Monday 07 November 2005

In a move that further blurs the lines of television and the internet, Yahoo! and TiVo have partnered to schedule downloads to TiVo boxes from any internet connection.

Starting on Monday, consumers will be able to schedule recordings on their TiVo box from a special Yahoo! portal. Subscribers would need a valid Yahoo! account with a yahoo.com e-mail address as well as a valid TiVo user account.

Additional content sharing between TiVo and Yahoo! such as traffic, weather and user photos, is almost assured before the year is out, according to Associated Press reports.

Representatives for TiVo and Yahoo! were not immediately available to comment.

Previously code-named Tahiti, the service is designed for TiVo Series2 recorders. TiVo's digital video recorders uses hard drives to store large amounts of content and let viewers pause live shows and program their systems to record TV broadcasts and even skip ad breaks.

From any Yahoo! TV episode page, users can click the "Record to my TiVo box" button, the companies said. The request is automatically sent to your home the next time your TiVo box connects. The companies suggest allowing for one hour of lag time if the TiVo is connected to broadband through a standard home network. Dialup users have to wait 36 hours for a request to take effect if the TiVo uses dialup.

Alviso, California-based TiVo has been in talks with several search engine companies including Yahoo! to build a new service that would let consumers search for videos on the web and then watch them on their television sets.

TiVo's service costs $12.95 per month, $155.40 for 12 months and $299 for a subscription that lasts the lifetime of the recorder, which the company estimates lasts four years. The company is specially offering the TiVo box for $49.99 after $150 mail-in rebate and service activation.

While practically a household name, TiVo is fighting to match the success of its brand name with a lasting business model in an increasingly competitive DVR market.

The company boasts about 3.6 million subscribers. However, it has added fewer subscribers to its ranks in the last few months than it had hoped.

TiVo is now looking for additional partnerships to make up for the loss of DirecTV, which said it has plans to cease marketing TiVo's product.

A partnership between TiVo and Yahoo! would offer expansion opportunities for both. TiVo has long talked about becoming the "Google of TV", eventually enabling its more than three million subscribers to search for and watch any broadcast or broadband media. Though TiVo opened the door for video downloads straight from the web, it does not yet offer such a feature.

Meanwhile, Google and Yahoo! are investing heavily in video services.

Yahoo! signed deals with CNN.com and ABC News in August to expand the content it offers. Yahoo! this year also launched a searchable video archive.

Google Video is the company's latest experimental work to archive closed captioning of broadcast television shows and make their content searchable. The beta project launched earlier this year but it has yet to allow people to watch video clips.

Michael Singer writes for CNET News.com