TiVo opens up

Bringing internet to the living can become a reality sooner than expected now that TiVo has announced the release of a software development kit that allows third party application developers to build on the TiVo platform.

The development kit is part of TiVo's new platform dubbed Tahiti, that aims to bring internet access to consumer's television sets.

To show off the capabilities of the development kit, it will ship with three applications. One will show the user weather information collected from the internet. The other two are an RSS reader and a game.

The development kit has the potential to bring new applications to consumer's living rooms and in the process make TiVo the platform of choice for the digital home. It's a cunning plan, if only TiVo succeeds. The company unfortunately has failed miserably over the past years at conquering a commanding lead in the market for digital video records.

Now that the competition has since awoken, it remains to be seen if TiVo can recover.