Rovi's Liquid media guide will provide access to broadcast TV, broadband Internet content, and personal media.
(Credit: Rovi)Macrovision, best known for its digital rights management software, officially changed its name today to Rovi. To celebrate, the company announced a new media guide, code named "Liquid." According to the press release, Liquid will merge television, Internet, and personal multimedia content into a single, sleek graphical interface. Rovi plans on releasing the guide to consumer electronics manufacturers in early 2010.
The media guide is broken up into three basic areas. First off is a FiOS-like interactive guide to broadcast TV, which appears to offer extensive information and playback options. The second major component will offer broadband services like Slacker Radio, Roxio CinemaNow, and YouTube XL, the large-screen-friendly version of the popular video streaming site. Rovi also announced that it is working with Blockbuster to integrate its OnDemand service for access to full-length movie rentals. Finally, the guide will be able to access and share personal media, such as a digital photo collection (although it's not clear how exactly you'll incorporate or share your own media). Liquid will also personalize your experience with recommendations from social networks like Flixster and by learning your preferences and tastes and incorporating them into user profiles.
In terms of design, the guide looks very impressive, but there is a visible error in the TV guide, as one Engadget commenter points out. In the featured image, 48 Hours Mystery, a CBS program, is also mistakenly listed under ABC. (Crave is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.) If this isn't a mock-up image, then Liquid is probably using preset data instead of pulling real guide data. It remains to be seen what the guide will actually look like in action.
Rovi is also rather vague about what exactly Liquid will be able to offer beyond the few announced features. For example, the press release says that the guide will provide access to "full length television and movie content for both free and paid services, as well as additional content including Internet video, popular music, social networking, and other Internet destinations." While the announced content certainly fits under that description, so does an extensive list of other destinations on the Internet, so we'll have to wait and see what else Liquid will support.
As of now, Rovi hasn't announced which companies or models will support Liquid, so we don't really know yet when (or even if) the guide will actually see the light of your TV.
JVC engineers failed to duplicate the glitch
(Credit: JVC)There's still no word on whether the TiVo Series3 will be seeing a price cut in the near future. But in the meantime, it's worth visiting an issue that cropped up during our testing of the box back in the fall of 2006. At that time, we noticed that the Series3 analog-video outputs exhibited some strange behavior when connected to JVC A/V receivers via HDMI--essentially, the composite and S-video outputs wouldn't work when playing back recordings that were flagged as "restricted" by the content provider.
Both TiVo and JVC have since followed up on the issue, but neither was able to duplicate the problem as experienced by CNET. A TiVo representative suggested that the copy-protection flag was inserted by the local cable company (the New York City Time Warner Cable franchise). That's why, the rep theorized, neither TiVo nor JVC could recreate the problem when recording the exact same programs from the same channels elsewhere in the country (neither company is located in New York).
It's also worth noting that Macrovision--which we originally identified as a possible culprit in the JVC problem--has nothing to do with the digital copy protection on the Series3. To clarify the issue, TiVo has long since updated its online support documents, separately listing the four levels of digital copy protection ("copy not restricted," "no further copying is permitted," "one generation copy is permitted," and "copying is prohibited").
For their part, JVC engineers even diagrammed their testing regimen, reproduced here:
We can't retest the problem ourselves because our Series3 review sample was returned to TiVo months ago. So, it is unknown whether the problem was due to a Time Warner, NYC-specific, copy-protection flag, or it was simply a temporary glitch that's been corrected by a subsequent software update to the TiVo. For all we know, it may still crop up in New York (or elsewhere) when and if the programs get flagged as such. I'm still peeved that such copy protection flags exist at all, but I applaud the engineers at TiVo and JVC for following up on the issue, and doing the best they could to get to the bottom of it.
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