TiVo has announced that Marty Yudkovitz has resigned as president of the company, while the company’s latest strategy is to open the doors to developers.
The president of digital video recorder company since May of 2003, Marty said he was resigning as president to spend more time with his wife and children. He will remain with TiVO for a period in a consulting capacity.
The announcement comes only weeks after news that Michael Ramsay would step down as chief executive. The two executives apparently failed to agree on the terms on which to license the TiVo service to cable operators.
Now it seems that the company, which became a household name in America synonymous with the personal video recorder, is going open source. At least it has announced a development kit under an open source licence that will allow third parties to create Java applications that extend the latest TiVo service.
It is part of TiVo’s new Tahiti strategy, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show. The software development kit offers broadcasters and developers a means to deploy media rich broadband applications to TiVo subscribers.
TiVo expects a wide variety of interactive applications will be created, such as rich music and photo services, advanced program and movie guides, sports applications, local weather info, and multiplayer social games.
“This is a unique opportunity for software developers and companies to extend the TiVo experience,” said Arthur van Hoff, principal engineer at TiVo. “TiVo’s open platform is the quickest way to deliver a TV experience around broadband applications, making TiVo much more than a basic DVR.”
However, applications developed cannot currently control any of the scheduling, recording or playback capabilities of the device, which seems somewhat limiting.