Tivo Adds Google Picasa & Photobucket for TV Viewing of Photographs

Here is a blog entry that I was creating on December 3, 2007 and just got too busy to finish it in a timely fashion.

I just tried out the new capability on Tivo's digital video recorders (DVR) and came away with mixed feelings in the short-term but positive feelings in the long term.

I had to look for the feature repeatedly today and found the new Photos & Slideshows menu item far below the area where the now non-existing Yahoo! Photos still appears unfortunately.

The menu item should have been placed either at the top of the list or at least viewable on the same screen without scrolling down.  It falls into the background and without any emphasis currently which is unfortunate.  The Yahoo! should be totally removed.

My earlier search this morning upon receiving the news was a failed attempt due to the placement of the new features.

I already had accounts with both Photobucket which is owned by MySpace and Picasa which is owned by Google and entering the appropriate login information was very straightforward.

I got distracted by my daughters while entering my information for the Picasa account and was pleasantly surprised to see that I did not have to start completely over.

You are able to stay logged into both accounts to view photos without going through a cumbersome process to switch between the services.

Picasa has the capability of viewing photo albums within your account and I will need to do further research to see if Photobucket offers the same capability.

There is basically no competition between the services other than the ownership of the services.

While viewing the photographs on the television, they did take on a new personality due to the increased size and seemed richer in depth.

The slideshow capability allows the transitions to be changed to either display the captions and photo titles or not as well as the amount of time between each photo.

Before I believed that Tivo would be acquired by Yahoo! but I now believe that Yahoo! has already missed the train and resulting opportunity.

Amazon has stepped into the picture and the Amazon Unbox service is very cool and we have rented and downloaded paid and free stuff over the weekend.  No trips back to the video store is a good thing!

Amazon could acquire  Tivo in a far better move and with greater synchronicity than if Yahoo! acquired  Tivo.

I doubt that Google is interested since they are more interested in the advertising aspects versus the content side.  On second thought, the data generated by  Tivos would be a goldmine to Google but Google has not moved far enough in this direction still.

Peace!