TiVO Moves Towards Wireless Picture Frames

At the end of March TiVO took a step that brought it closer to becoming a provider of content to wireless digital picture frames.

This came as the result of TiVo announcing a partnership with One True Media to launch a video and photo sharing service on its devices. The service, which is free while still in beta and will run $3.99 a month or $39.99 a year afterwards, lets TiVO customers create video montages, photo slideshows, add soundtracks, and then share them with other TiVO customers.

Well, that sounds neat, you may be saying, but that’s quite a digital picture frame, is it? It’s not. Yet. But it’s not far off, either.

To see how TiVO is edging towards our space, you have to think of a TV not as a delivery mechanism for TV shows and movies, but rather as a display for any visual information (Tom Berarducci touched on this in his interview with us) – including photos.

When you think of it that way, a TiVO-equipped TV can now, thanks to this service, be a digital picture frame. But there’s an even bigger step that could be taken.

We believe the future of digital photo frames includes not just photos, but also all kinds of content delivered over a network.

We’ve seen a number of frame manufacturers offer content for their frames in the form of RSS feeds or content channels like those offered by Ceiva. With a tool like this, TiVO isn’t far off from offering that kind of service – assuming they can offer a software TiVO, rather than a hardware one.

Right now TiVO only offers a set-top box with its software installed. But what if the company ditched hardware and made its functionality available as software? If that happened, the TiVO software could be used on any digital display – whether designed for TV, photos, or general purposes – that supports its requirements and has a network connection.

In that scenario, you’d be able to display photos or share video and pictures on any digital display that’s networked and running the software. You might even be able to use the software to send all kinds of content to any digital display that you’re authorized on (the new Apple TV isn’t far off from this either). This possibility has been anticipated in my column What About Video? and in Tom Berarducci’s interview.

And once you have that in place, you’ve got TiVO competing directly with frame manufacturers and those offering content for wireless frames.

While a lot of this article is, of course, speculation and extrapolation, it’s not altogether unrealistic either. And it would be make for some interesting times in the wireless digital picture frame space.

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