Technology | Page 51 | www.brendonwilson.com

February 22, 2005February 7, 2009 by Brendon J. Wilson

Not “Tivoted”

It’s timely that Jeff Jarvis, Fred Wilson, and Om Malik have started kvetching about how to save TiVo. Just last night, I downloaded the TiVo Home Media Engine SDK to see if there was something worthwhile tinkering with. To be honest, I was kind of shocked at limited functionality provided by the SDK.

I was originally interested in creating a nice little application to destroy the TV broadcast model – you know, for fun! When I heard the TiVo SDK was based on Java, I figured I’d have everything I needed. I knew that the TiVo SDK didn’t allow video playback, but I thought I would be able to use the Java Media Framework to render Flash content. With a little tinkering, I figured I should be able to stitch together a simple app to push vodcasting a little closer to reality. Boy was I wrong.

The whole approach taken by the TiVo HME SDK is extremely limiting. Basically it’s a client-server approach that requires an application to live on a separate PC running the application, which sends commands over TCP/IP to the receiver (i.e. the TiVo box). While an application can stream audio or send images to the TiVo, no capabilities are provided for displaying video. Oh, I suppose if you were really desperate for this capability, you could hack together a solution that renders frames to a Graphics2D context, which could then be rendered as an image on the TiVo – but I’m guessing the performance would be horrible. And, anyway, as a developer I’m really not interested in hacking together codecs, I’m interested in writing applications.

I guess what bugs me about the SDK more than anything is that TiVo seems to be operating under the delusion that erecting fences around what a developer can access on a TiVo is a good idea. If TiVo is really serious, they need to look at allowing developers on the device itself (legitimately, I mean, as opposed to the current method for extending TiVo’s capabilities). Of course, TiVo seems to be happy enough to snub the cable companies, but not ballsy enough to really take on the established model – maybe we’ll have to wait for Akimbo for that?

C’mon TiVo, if you want a million flowers to bloom, you’ve got to give us everything! Give us a method to put code on the device (I mean, seriously, what average consumer is going to run stuff on another machine). Let us manipulate data! Let applications like mGrok (Disclosure: the guys behind mGrok are friends of mine) get access to raw MPEG data and build applications that enable people to get more out of their TiVo, their recorded shows, or content downloaded from the net. If you really want to beat Windows Media Center and continue to lead the industry you created, you’re going have to provide unlimited access (maybe you should follow Scoble’s suggestion and allow media-centric companies like Orb to solutions on top of your platform that don’t require yet another application on their home computer).

If you’re not prepared to bet all of your chips, it’s time to get out of the game.

February 19, 2005April 30, 2012 by Brendon J. Wilson

The Other Deep Web

Ashley and I went up to the California International Antiquarian Book Fair today. It was truly a humbling experience in many ways. While a large number of the cracked and creaking volumes in the fair were of little interest (there seemed to be an overabundance of antique fishing books for some reason), there were a few astounding gems.

Of particular interest were the original scientific volumes. A first edition copy of Newton’s “Opticks“. Treatises by Galileo, Copernicus, and Descartes. An original copy of Einstein’s publication introducing the theory of general relativity, and another introducing the photo-electric effect. A first edition of the King James Bible. A first edition copy of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” (a limited edition bound in asbestos). But why do these books matter? We know the words, the ideas, and the illustrations. What’s left to captivate us? I pondered this while watching a woman nearly suffer an emotional implosion while examining some obscure volume of philosophy that obviously held some powerful sway over her.

I guess in some way, we all look to try to get closer to the original author of some book that meant something to us. To try to get inside them. Maybe if we can reach back in time far enough through these books, we think, we can actually touch their authors’ greatness (and maybe some of what they had will rub off on us). While it starts innocently enough – a first edition here, a copy signed by the author there, an original marked up copy of the manuscript, etc. – but sometimes it gets truly weird.

At some point today the obsessive nature of the antiquarian book trade became readily apparent when I found one vendor selling Robert Louis Stevenson’s matriculation card from the University of Edinburgh. It’s one thing to like the guy’s books, it’s entirely another to want to own the card attesting to his status as a university graduate. That’s kicking it up a notch. In another area, I found a copy of Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog” originally owned by Theodore Roosevelt, along with a personal letter from Roosevelt attesting to how much it meant to him. How ironic.

Internet geeks have been talking for years about the “deep web” – the dark matter of the Internet universe that remains hidden from the pervasive prying eyes of voyeur search engines. While the term is often applied to data curtained behind corporate firewalls, today the term took on a new meaning for me. Today, it referred to all the ancient “obsolete” knowledge trapped in ancient volumes that would never be visited by Googlebot, or scanned by Amazon. Today, it referred to the collective emotion of the human race for the books and authors they love. There’s no indexing that.