Om Malik has been discussing [1 2] TiVo’s plans following its acquisition of Strangeberry. Given the interest in the digital home, TiVo is a nice, potential acquisition candidate. Writes Om:
TiVo is finally getting its digital hub act together. The purchase of Strangeberry is yet another proof that it is going to be competing with the likes of Microsoft in the digital hub sweepstakes…TiVo at present can save video and playback video easily. It can easily take music stream from your computer and play-it back through your music system. And now if Strangeberry can provide easy control and management through TiVo, you are talking big dollars.
Strangeberry has developed a software platform, where content providers such as magazines, television networks, advertisers, and others can send content directly to the Strangeberrys over the internet. In other words, the content providers have full control over the choices that show up on the screen, the user interface shown to the user, and can have data transmitted back to them over an Internet connection.In other words go to sleep, get up in the morning and have the latest Jenna Jameson video downloaded to your hard disk. Or pay $2 and get the top ten MTV tracks. Or simply, download the CNN headline news. Now, thats a killer app.
Adds Kevin Werbach: “Strangeberry is apparently made up of ex-Sun people, and the idea of universal zero-configuration networking was a big element of Sun co-founder Bill Joy’s Jini vision. Of course, all the major consumer PC vendors, most notably Gateway, Sony, and HP, have similar dreams, as do Apple, Microsoft, and your cable company. This probably makes Tivo interesting acquisiton bait. But for whom? Tivo is built on Linux, so it probably isn’t a fit for any of the Windows-centric companies. Or for Apple, which has its own Rendezvous networking technology.”
Why can’t we build these kinds of companies in India?
