Going the Opposite of Cord Cutting - The Tivo Stream

You would think that my being a tech geek/early adopter type means that I would have been one of the first to jump on the "cord cutting" bandwagon and dump my cable subscription.  And trust me...the thought of cutting out a $100+ monthly Comcast bill, along with the usually horrible Comcast customer service department, crosses my mind each time I see that charge on my Visa statement.  But attractive as that sounds, and despite the fact that I am downloading/streaming more and more of my video content, I can't seem to escape the clutches of my cable subscription.  One of the main reasons for this is the obvious one for many us, namely live sports.  Until the major networks come up with an equitable solution for cord cutters to access their live content over the internet this may be a huge stumbling block for me and other sports fans.  The other reason is simply convenience...having all my video content stored on an easily accessible hard disk still beats picking and choosing content from various sources (Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, etc.) and having to deal with the occasional internet connectivity issue while downloading or streaming.

Which brings me to Tivo...I've used quite a number of DVRs over the years, and their UI's range from simply horrible (Comcast) to pretty decent (DirecTV) to Tivo, which is still the best of the bunch despite not having done much in recent years to advance their technology.  The one nice thing about Tivo, though is that it's an open platform, so as a result there are some extremely clever and useful 3rd-party projects such as PyTivo and kmttg that extend the functionality of the platform.  I recently decided to upgrade my unit, because believe it or not I watch enough TV that I occasionally run into situations where I need to record more than two shows at once...their new Premiere 4 allows you to record up to four shows concurrently.  One of the other reasons I picked up the new unit is because Tivo was offering a bundled deal which includes the Premiere 4, a MoCA adapter which basically allows you to attach wired devices to your network via your home's existing cable coax, and their relatively new Tivo Stream mini-device which lets you stream and/or download content from your Tivo box to your iPad.  The device itself is small (4"x4") and super simple - just plug in the AC adapter and connect to your home network with an ethernet cable and you're all set to go.

The Stream allows you to stream content from your Premier that was previously recorded or is currently recording, and it also lets you downloaded content directly to your iPad for offline viewing...both of these functions are performed using the free Tivo iOS app.  As you might expect the app looks and feels similar to its TV sibling, so there was zero learning curve involved.  One cool feature is that you can "slide" the playback marker to any specific time within the program - something that you can't do with the TV remote.  For the most part everything worked pretty flawlessly and as advertised.  If you began watching a program on your TV, paused it and later resumed watching it from your iPad, it remembers where you previously left off and picks up from that point...and vice versa. The one annoying bug I found is that if you stream a program that is still being recorded, your streaming gets interrupted when you get to the location where the Tivo was recording as you began your streaming session...you have to jump back out to the "Now Playing" list, select the program again and then it will resume streaming from the point where it left off.

Will Tivo sell many of these Stream units?  Probably not, as it's really a niche product at the moment with a fairly limited audience.  First off, it only works with the iPad, so if you're thinking about using it to stream to your desktop/laptop computer or Android device you're basically SOL.  Secondly, the streaming function only works within your internal home network, i.e. you can't stream over the internet...which is really a shame because if it did this then I would no longer have a need for a Slingbox.  And lastly, it obviously only works with Tivo and specifically with later modeled Tivo's...and your Tivo needs to be ethernet or MOCA connected to your home network to boot.  However, if you can deal with these limitations then the Stream is a nice add on and essentially turns your iPad into an additional (and portable) home television.

Amazon Cloud Player vs. Google Music Beta

Last week Apple gave us a previous of iCloud and iOS 5 at its annual WWDC conference. What they showed was pretty impressive, but most of it is still beta and won't be generally available until the Fall.  Of particular interest to me are their plans around moving iTunes to the cloud and finally relieving us of the painful and outdated method of cabled sync in order to move content to mobile devices.  But if you're like me you don't live in a world where Steve Jobs has complete control over your mobile existence, there are a couple of Android-based alternatives available right now that you might want to look at;  Amazon Cloud Player and Google Music Beta.

Amazon Cloud Player has been around for the past two months or so, and I've been using it off and on since then with generally good success.  They give everyone 5GB of storage for free, but as I mentioned in a prior blog post you can get an upgrade to 20GB by purchasing any album, including a bunch for just 99 cents.  Google Music Beta came out shortly after Amazon and gives you storage for up to 20,000 songs; plenty more than most people will require. I finally received an invite to the beta a couple of weeks ago and so I installed it right away and had a chance to compare it with Amazon.  Here's how the two offerings compare:

Installation: Both products download and install very easily, and both use a Flash-based component for scanning music on your local machine and uploading it to the cloud.  But they greatly differ in their approaches to this.  The Amazon uploader must be manually initiated, and once it kicks off it spends a few minutes analyzing your iTunes library, compares it to what's already been stored in the cloud, and then presents you a screen where you can either automatically upload all the music it finds that's not already in the cloud or selectively upload the playlists, albums, artists, etc. that you'd like to be synced.  It also provides a comprehensive report of content that it finds that it is unable to sync, e.g. DRM'd content.  By contrast, Google's default mode is to always run in the background and automatically upload new iTunes music to the cloud, without the user having to take action.  In theory this seems like a better and more elegant solution.  However, in my case the Google software consumed nearly all of the CPU on my machine while scanning/uploading my iTunes content, and to add to my frustration the upload process itself took an incredibly long time - roughly a couple of days to upload just 3500 songs.  In fact, the CPU consumption was so bad that I had to go into Task Manager and lower the priority of the Google music manager process.
Advantage: Amazon


Web Music Player: To be honest, I didn't spend much time using either player - after all, I've got iTunes running on my laptop!  But they both seemed to do the job, and Google's player has a few extra features such as thumbs up/thumbs down and keeping track of the play count.  But I do like the look of the Amazon player a little more, plus it has the advantage of being able to play music purchased from the Amazon MP3 store.
Advantage: Neither - it's a tie.


Mobile App: Both mobile apps did the job and generally worked well over Wi-Fi or when wireless coverage wasn't in issue.  But on several occasions the Google app would just stop midway through a song for no explainable reason.   I like the UI better on Amazon, and I like the fact that it lets you easily switch between music in the cloud vs. music sitting on your device.  Google lets you do this as well, but you have to go into one of the options settings in order to switch back and forth...a bit of a pain.   I've also used both applications during long bike rides that went through areas of spotty to low coverage, and I have to say that both applications had their share of issues when dealing with bad coverage and both frequently just stop working and never recover even when reception improves - maybe they should reverse engineer the Pandora app and figure out how they are so good at dealing with this. Google would also randomly skip both forwards and backwards within a song when experiencing reception issues...very strange.  Amazon performed a bit better, and I suspect it "reads ahead" within a playlist and stores upcoming songs within its local cache.  I'm sure Google does some of this too, but perhaps its cache is smaller.  One very annoying problem with Amazon is that it sometimes caches garbage for a song, and once it does then each time you play that song you'll hit that garbage and it just stops playing..at least until the cache is cleared.
Advantage: Amazon


iOS Support: Well, as you would expect neither offering has native iOS support, although both claim to be usable from Mobile Safari.  I was able to verify this myself using my iPad.
Advantage: Neither - it's a tie.


In summary, I have to give a slight edge to Amazon, although not by much.  And both companies need to spend time on their Android apps and improve their handling and recovery of reception issues.

Oh, and it looks like Spotify is close to launching here in the U.S....I can't wait.