“Little boxes on the console, little boxes with ethernet, little boxes on the console and they are almost just the same. There’s the Roku, and the Tivo, there’s the Yamaha and the Etherswitch, there’s the macintosh, and the keyboard. And they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they have remotes that are all the same.” Apologies to Malvina Reynolds and her 1962 hit.
I am the new owner of a ROKU box, and I have for years been a TIVO owner. I want both in a single box. The Roku has an ethernet connector and an HDMI connector and has innovative applications for watching internet TV, like Netflix, Hulu, and specific channels that they are adding every month.
The Tivo allows you to record live shows by name and watch them later. They also have implemented an ethernet connection and allow netflix. But the company feels stodgy and slow; they will implement hulu but only on their latest box (the Tivo Premire) not on their existing zillions of boxes. They don’t have a documented interface that allows people to write applications and therefore channels, like Roku.
I can see the winner: roku or a similar box; but I want to record live TV for another 2-3 years. Can’t roku put an antenna connector and a 500GB disk on their box? Can’t Tivo create an open interface for programmers to add content to your TIVO from the web?
Arrrrgh.
Bill
