CES 99 News: Philips and TiVo Team Up for “Personal TV”

by Stephen Muratore, Executive Editor

Philips announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Jan. 7 a commitment to use TiVo software and service in many of its products for the coming year. Notably, Philips showed a set-top box that uses TiVo software to capture a viewer’s program-type preferences. The box contains a hard drive (choice of either 12 or 20 gigabytes) that records TV programs according to these preferences, and a modem to communicate them to TiVo’s server which translates these preferences into specific program choices. Notably, the TiVo software doesn’t provide an electronic program guide. Instead, it searches for programs by categories (e.g. “football”) entered by the viewer. The box is capable of recording (MPEG-2) between 6-18 hours of programming depending upon the size of hard drive and compression ratio chosen. Users will probably pay a $10/mo. subscription fee for the use of the TiVo server. At the demo, Philips reps were referring to the box as a “personal TV standalone set top box.” It will be available in the market in the first half on ‘99. Philips is also building DirecTV tuners into some of its TVs and VCRs—which also use TiVo software. These will be available the latter half of ‘99 “Personal TV is the umbrella term Philips is now using to describe its whole line of TV-related products.

Also, Philips showed AMBI: a package of wirless keyboard and RF transmitter and receiver that allows wireless connection between PCs and TVs.