Review: Tivo with Podcasting, Yahoo, Live365, Movie Ticket

I've been sick at home for the past two days and it has sucked. On top of that, I've had to move A LOT of stuff around in my apartment, buy and pickup a mattress set off of craigslist, clean the entire apartment, and pickup my in-laws at SFO. Needless to say I'm beat.

This past evening, I finally noticed that Tivo had updated my box with the ability to access their new Podcasting/Yahoo/Live365/MovieTickets feature. Of course, I grabbed my Digital Rebel XT and started snapping.

The review comes after the jump...

This review contains a LOT of images as it is meant to be a detailed review. Here we go:

You've seen this screen before but I thought I'd put my version in just to be sure we start off on the right foot:

So I clicked on Yahoo Weather first

I immediately added my yahoo account (a little tedious, but you only need to this the first time):

The password entry is not very secure. It shows the current character and then covers it with an asterisk after a second or two.

And of course, you get the TOS page:

After all of that, I am treated to the weather from all of the saved cities on the "my.yahoo.com" page.

If I come back to the weather app, I'm already logged in:

I decided to see what the traffic map looks like:

I was expecting a map of some sort, but just got a plain old list:

Then I tried Yahoo Photos and get this screen:

I did not have any albums created so I was not able to view my photos (I will upload some sample photos with my PC soon to give it a shot). This app does not seem to allow you to add new photos or create albums. It looks like it is strictly a photo viewer (leaving all management for the PC). To find other photos, you must know the username of your friends and type them in with an onscreen keyboard using arrow keys and select button. I decided to enter the name of a friend on my yahoo contact list that I know has photos. Within a second or two, her albums popped up and I was able to view her albums.

Then next time I return to photos, it remembers my friend's name, but then I started thinking, "why didn't it just load all of my contacts from my Yahoo messenger contact list?"...I mean it loaded weather and traffic from my stored data, they COULD have just yanked my contact data from my Yahoo messenger contact list. I'm going to have to assume it has something to do with privacy since the Tivo seems to cache your credentials and they don't want random people seeing your contact list (think: your other Jersey wife), but the world may never know the true reason.

The next app I give a try to is the Movie Ticket app (some sort of intro screen, ummm ok):

After the intro screen, you get to the real homepage for the app:

Box office stats (very neat):

Coming soon (cool Memoirs of a Geisha):

Let's try one (ooooh LOST):

Browse other things while you stream a podcast.

PARTING THOUGHTS:
Yahoo Photos: Please pull my contacts from Yahoo Messenger's contact list as a default set. Please let me manage albums and photos on the Tivo box. Please let me copy photos from my home network to my Yahoo photos account.

Yahoo Weather: Cool, but a little formatting could go a long way.

Yahoo Traffic: Map please...

Movie Tickets: Let me buy for non-Century theaters please. Video trailers, interviews, outakes would make this really cool. It'd be cool to keep track of movies I've seen (not sure if it can do this since I didn't purchase anything). Let me play with the same credit card that pays my Tivo account. Otherwise, pretty neat.

Live365: I like it, but please denote Live365 "premium" stations in the list rather than having me click on something only to tell me that I can't listen to it. Better yet, take these out of the list completely unless I'm a premium subscriber.

Podcaster: Workings of a winner. Let me search instead of adding URLs (can't imagine typing in an URL on tivo). A wider selection would be nice (iTunes has a decent set). Streaming is cool, but let I save them to my Tivo box if I want. Let me transfer them from my Tivo to my PC. Let me burn them onto CD as audio or MP3 if I have a Tivo with burner.

Overall, I give this functionality upgrade a 3.5 out of 5. It'll be cool to see how they progress down this road, but I hope it involves giving me more choices about what to do wtih the content and making it more convenient to find and get the content.