Web video on Tivo – not quite there

Tivo’s announcement this week that its new Tivo Desktop Plus software would allow customers to download Web videos on to their Tivo units had me excited at the prospect of being able to view the videos in our Network World Video library on my TV. Turns out, that’s not quite the case. While Tivo does mention that it supports videos delivered via RSS (which we do offer for the Video Library), it is only RSS feeds with a video enclosure. Unfortunately, the Brightcove-generated feeds we use are just links back to a player on our site. The videos themselves are not downloaded to your local hard drive for playback. It does work with video podcasts downloaded from iTunes, since those files are stored locally. I tried it with our Cool Tools feed and it worked pretty well. Tivo Desktop can be configured to monitor certain folders and transfer a set number of new videos automatically to a specific networked Tivo in the house. One can than access downloaded videos through the “Now Playing List”. Right now, we’re encoding our iTunes MPEG-4 videos at 320×240 resolution, so when viewed on a HD TV stretched across the full 16:9 aspect ration, the quality is blah. Even when paneled, it is not spectacular. We’re looking at expanding our encode to 640×480, so hopefully that’ll help a little. Bottom line is, if you watch a lot of video podcasts through iTunes, the Tivo Desktop Plus option will allow you to move the couch and watch on a bigger screen. Hopefully, Tivo will create a way to subscribe/view all Web video directly from the Tivo box itself, skipping the Desktop middleman all together.