Two of my most favorite companies, TiVo & Royal Caribbean, recently announced a deal whereby Royal Caribbean will run a series of ads on the TiVo platform.

Royal Caribbean’s 30-second spots, “Golf,” “Rock Wall” and “Pisa,” via Havas’ Arnold in Boston, will become interactive, allowing TiVo subscribers to move from a commercial to a TiVo Showcase featuring a video encouraging consumers to record a one-hour Royal Caribbean special on The Travel Channel. The program will premiere on The Travel Channel on Oct. 14.

Who ever called TiVo an add destroyer? As of late there has been a lot of news about TiVo and how it is destroying the advertising industry. Maybe more companies need to rethink how they can advertise their products? In actuality, TiVo is an excellent platform for advertising. It allows the viewer to interact with the advertisement and get more information if they are interested. I think that more companies need to consider TiVo as an ad enabler as opposed to an ad destroyer….

According to TiVo’s Chief Financial Officer (David Courtney), the relationship between TiVo and DirecTV remains solid.

Executives at DirecTV “have not given any indication that they expect to change course,” he told attendees at a Morgan Stanley conference in California.

This is great news for TiVo. A large percentage of new subscribers come from the DirecTV partnership. There will be some major problems if DirecTV decides to go ahead with their own DVR. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

On a side note, Courtney also mentioned the much anticipated partnership between Netflix and TiVo. Here’s what he said:

We certainly do know them…and have had discussions with them about opportunities to work together,” he said, but “there is no agreement announced.”

Based on that statement, it looks as though it might be awhile before the partnership is announced…

Ever wonder how TiVo can change your life? Rainbow Rowell over at Omaha.com talks about her life before and after TiVo and the reasons why you need a TiVo. It’s a great article for somebody who is considering getting a TiVo.

There’s some funny stuff in this article including the following:

I’m trying to figure out where on my body to ink the TiVo mascot. My eyeballs? My remote control hand?

Check it out….it’s worth a visit.

TVHarmony brought to my attention an article that digitalmerging.la has about the 2 million subscriber mark.

The article attempts to answer the following question: What would happen to TiVo and its’ subscribers if TiVo were to go under? Check it out for some great insight into the potential outcome of a TiVo collapse.

Here’s more news about TiVo’s major marketing campaign. Just yesterday TiVo annouced that they hired Matt Wisk as their Chief Marketing Officer.

According to the previous mentioned article, Matt has extensive experience in the area of marketing. Prior to signing on with TiVo Matt has worked for Herbalife and Nokia. I’m sure that his experience will help TiVo in their quest for 3 million subscribers!

TVHarmony.com has brought to my attention the fact that TiVo now has two million subscribers!

This is great news for TiVo since they established a goal for themselves of 3 million subscribers by next January. In order to achieve this goal, TiVo needs to have roughly 200K-250K new subscribers per month. I guess their marketing campaign is working!

More information can be found here.

Warner Bros. has agreed to license several of its’ films to Netflix. This agreement will presumably allow Netflix to use these films for video-on-demand (VOD) testing with TiVo!

One of the biggest concerns most people have with the Netflix & TiVo partnership is that they won’t be able to get the movie industry to give up some of their rights to the movies. This is definitely good news for the TiVo & Netflix partnership!

Ever wonder what the main difference is between ReplayTV and TiVo? Check out this article which talks about a test that the Good Housekeeping Institute performed.

One of the funny things about the test is that the engineers who performed it had to call ReplayTV for tech support! That’s what makes TiVo great. Even my grandmother can use it :).

Do you have any differences that you would like to highlight. To be perfectly honest, I’ve never used a ReplayTV box before.

What follows is an interview that I had with JavaHMO creator Leon Nicholls. I sent Leon the following questions and he was gracious enough to answer them for me.

1. What do you do for a living?
I’m a software engineer for a company that does VOIP products for phone
companies. I program mostly in Java and develop mostly web interfaces for
our products.

2. Why did you create JavaHMO?
I started using HMO during August 2003 while TiVo had a free trial period and got hooked into the possibilities of the product. I thought it would be interesting to dynamically generate images which could be displayed on TiVo. These images could contain all kinds of interesting content from the internet. I discovered that TiVo had published the specifications of the HMO protocol and so I started writing my own media server in Java. The code I wrote worked so well that I thought I would share it by creating JavaHMO as an open source project.

3. What is your favorite feature about your TiVo? I would guess it is HMO
however, I thought I would ask :).
HMO is both my favorite and my most frustrating feature of TiVo
Its my favorite since it is such a simple product that is very nicely integrated with the excellent TiVo interface. However, as a developer it is very frustrating not being able to do so many things in HMO that would enhance the user experience. I have posted some suggestions on how HMO could be improved for developers (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=160431&highlight=javahmo).
However, since HMO was released, TiVo has not made any improvements to the product.

4. How much time do you spend on JavaHMO per week/day?
The time I spend on JavaHMO varies dramatically depending on how busy I am at work and how tired I feel when I get home. Some weeks I’ll spend several hours per week on the product, other times weeks might go by before I do any work on it. This year it has been particularly busy at work so the time between the version 1.2 and 2.0 of JavaHMO has been much longer than I anticipated.

5. Why is JavaHMO better then any other HMO server?
JavaHMO is open source which means its free and you can get all of the source code. Since it is written in Java, the same code will run on multiple operating systems. The product has been used by many people and is quite stable. Any serious bugs are usually fixed quickly. There are several useful resources for the product at the project homepage (http://javahmo.sourceforge.net) or at the TiVo Community Forum (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=35) JavaHMO has been maintained regularly and has had several releases. The project is still very active and the 2.0 version will be released in the near future. Many of the features that JavaHMO supports have been suggested by users.

6. Can you describe some of the new features in version 2.0?
The main motivation for the 2.0 release was to make it easier to add new kinds of content to JavaHMO. So it was decided to make the JavaHMO content pluggable. This required that the architecture of the product be significantly improved. Most of these changes will not be visible to users, although there will be some improvements in performance. Version 2.0 will allow developers to add new content without having to know the HMO protocol.

All of the existing content will also be available in 2.0 as plugins:
Desktop viewer, Games, Image viewer, Internet images, Movie listings, MP3 player, MP3 organizer, M3U and PLS playlist support, Shoutcast streams, and local weather conditions.
In addition, 2.0 introduces numerous new plugins:
- Email: read your incoming email on the TiVo interface,
- Image organizer: similar to the audio organizer to allow you to categorize
your images by dates
- iTunes playlists (MP3 files only)
- Jukebox: this plugin will allow you to pick your favorite songs using the
HMO interface to create a dynamic playlists
- NNTP: download and view NNTP (News server) images automatically
- RSS: view RSS published content on the internet
- Web pages: view fullscreen versions of any web page
- Expanded weather: alerts for your county from the National Weather
Service will be part of the weather plugin
- Stocks: view the daily trading information of stocks

JavaHMO will also be able to run alongside the TiVo Publisher since it will support the TiVo Beacon API that TiVo released recently
(http://tivo.com/developer/i/TiVoBeaconSdk.zip)

Version 2.0 will also include a new configuration GUI which will elliminate all of the problems that the currently HMTL version has.

Numerous bugs fixes and feature requests will also be included.

7. When do you expect version 2.0 to be released?
The last bit of development work that needs to be completed is the new configuration GUI. The GUI had gone through several developers hands but never got anywhere. So I have taken up the task of developing the GUI. The coding is going well and I hope to have it completed within a week. I expect to then have several beta releases which will be tested by the developers and other interested users. If that goes well, version 2.0 will be publicly released soon afterwards.

8. What are some of the future features you plan on implementing?
Since TiVo has not updated the HMO specification since it was released, there would be no need to do any additional development of the media server
components of JavaHMO. However, I do anticipate that more content will be regularly added to JavaHMO over time. Realistically, I dont anticipate that TiVo will be making any more investments in HMO. I am hoping that their investment in Strangeberry will result in some product in the near future that will go beyond HMO and will turn TiVo into a true internet appliance.

9. Do you have any idea of the number of people using JavaHMO?
I dont have any way to track the number of active users. The only numbers I have are the page view statistics (http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/?group_id=87487) and the download statistics (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=87487&package_id=91178&release_id=218106)
that Sourceforge maintiains for the project. I also get several support
requests by email each day from users of JavaHMO.

10. Have you ever been contacted by TiVo?
I have not been officially been contacted by TiVo. However, I do know that several of TiVo’s employees have used JavaHMO.

11. How is JavaHMO developed?
For each version I make up a wishlist of features that have come from the other developers or from the users (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=583315&group_id=87487&func=browse).
The developers will then tackle the features and bugs. Over the lifetime of the project I have contributed most of the code, however some of the other developers have made significant contributions. Some developers have contributed new or improved functionality; some have fixed numerous bugs; some have made small contributions and then disappeared; some are more involved during the beta testing and release phases of the project.

According to this article, TiVo and ReplayTV have agreed to limit how long you can keep a pay-per-view movie on your TiVo.

The article states that starting in the spring of 2005, TiVo will start to ship boxes with this limitation built in.

One control would limit recording to 90 minutes — essentially enough time for a viewer to watch an on-demand movie. Another would allow a movie to be stored for up to seven days but once the film was started it must be viewed within 24 hours. Another would allow unlimited viewing within a seven-day period.

This is obviously not something that TiVo customers have asked for….