YouTube on TiVo
July 18, 2008
TiVo is to offer thousands of its subscribers the ability to stream YouTube videos onto their television sets through their broadband-enabled TiVo boxes. It’s TiVo’s first deal for streaming online content, though the company has partnerships with 60 Internet sites that provide content to TiVo. Unlike with those relationships, TiVo users won’t be able to store YouTube video clips, just watch them and bookmark them for easy retrieval later.TiVo’s most popular Internet content partner thus far is Amazon Unbox, which features rented movies that are downloaded to TiVo set-top boxes for viewing on TV screens.Tara Maitra, GM of content services at TiVo, said the company’s users have downloaded 27 million pieces of content from the 60 Internet partners. Beyond Amazon Unbox, product reviews from the likes of CNET and comedy shorts from such sources as the Onion and Break.com are popular.YouTube, though, is expected to quickly outdo them all. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, YouTube attracted 68 million unique users in May who streamed 3.8 billion videos, making it by far the most popular video brand on the Internet. Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace, was second with 18 million unique users and 328 million video streams.Back