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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Do you need a Perfect Machine? Well, "need" is a strong word. Do you need your TiVo, iPod, cable TV, DSL, subscription to the New Yorker, or dinner at Chez Panisse? If you say yes to several of these things, you're likely the type to need a Perfect Machine.
The Perfect Machine ameliorates laziness, refines sloth, embellishes indulgence. Here's an example: Like TiVo, the Perfect Machine would record all your TV shows. But it would make your shows accessible anywhere in your house, on every laptop and desktop, on every other Perfect Machine, every connected thing. I live in a small apartment in Oakland, Calif., designed in such a way that I can't see the one television in the apartment from the kitchen, which is where I spend a great deal of my time. Cooking, for me, is a pleasure, but a pleasure best combined with reruns of "South Park." So here's the difficulty: I'm in the kitchen. I'd like to watch what's on my TiVo. How can I do this? I need a Perfect Machine.
Or say that you're on your couch, 6 feet away from your computer, which is playing one of the tens of thousands of songs you have stored on its hard drive. You have a sudden, insatiable desire to listen to another song, a specific track, let's say, the Stones' "Satisfaction." If you're the type who's OK with getting up and walking to the computer to change the track, you don't need the Perfect Machine. If, on the other hand, you're like most civilized Americans and would prefer to change the song using a remote, with a listing of all your songs displayed on your television, you need a Perfect Machine.
The Perfect Machine comes in handy in other ways. Imagine that your mother, who never was a housewife, recently discovered she desperately loves "Desperate Housewives," a show that you happen to have been recording for the entire season. If you had a Perfect Machine, you could easily burn the recorded episodes to some DVDs and give them to her as a gift on Mother's Day. Or maybe, in a less-than-perfect moment, your Perfect Machine somehow forgot to record last week's episode of "The O.C." That's OK: The Perfect Machine will play all the video files you have stored on your computer, which means you can use one of those illegal file-sharing networks to download any TV show you like and stream it through your Perfect Machine to your TV.
The Perfect Machine will also download legal movies from the Internet (TiVo recently signed a deal with Netflix to make this possible), and let you browse online music stores from the comfort of your couch. It'll tell you the weather, show you CNN's headlines, or play your favorite Internet radio stations -- all at the push of a button. The Perfect Machine is flexible in the way that a computer is, but works as flawlessly as a DVD player. The Perfect Machine, the ultimate hybrid of a PC and a consumer electronics device, would be upgradable and minimally programmable, but it would never freeze up or slow down, and would be immune from bugs and spyware and spam and viruses of all kinds.
Is such perfection possible? Actually, none of these features is very advanced. TiVo has been offering many of these things in its machines for some time. If you've got a new TiVo you can connect it to your home network and give it access to all the songs and photos you've got stored on your machines. If you own two TiVos (in separate rooms, for instance) you can watch the shows on either one at either device. TiVoToGo, a new service the company unveiled this year, allows you to transfer the shows to a PC or burn them to a DVD. TiVo also recently announced a plan for its machines to access online content (such as the weather, or movies).
But while many features of the Perfect Machine are available in TiVo's new systems, they are far from perfect. The advanced applications are not especially easy to set up or use, and people have reported difficulty getting some of them to work. Take, for instance, TiVoToGo, the company's new service that allows you to move TV shows from your TiVo to your laptop (for instance, if you'd like to spend your New York-Los Angeles flight watching "Law & Order"). Because media companies worried that the TiVoToGo service would let people too easily trade TV shows online, TiVo was required by the FCC to install a host of copyright protections in the service, and initial reviews of the system faulted its tight restrictions. The system also suffered some unforgivable technical difficulties.
"On my first try, a two-hour movie took roughly eight hours to copy to my laptop over a somewhat weak WiFi signal," Rob Pegoraro wrote in the Washington Post about using TiVoToGo. "After I redid my network to provide a much stronger signal in the living room, I still saw transfer times of about 2 1/2 hours for movies lasting two hours or less." He added that every time you play a video on the system, "you'll see the same nag on the screen: 'Remember that the TiVoToGo feature is provided for your own personal non-commercial use.' This incessant nag bothered me more than I thought it would. I resented getting lectured every time, as if this little sermon was the only thing stopping me from tumbling into a life of crime. The paranoid level of security built into this system is almost comical -- in what universe should an episode of 'Desperate Housewives' get more protection than my Quicken financial data?"
TiVo did not respond to several interview requests, so it's hard to know how or why the usually technically proficient firm could release such a lackluster product. In TiVo's defense, it's worth noting that TiVo devotees seem to be generally satisfied with the new features. But some TiVo experts suggested that the trouble the company had in deploying TiVoToGo was precisely due to its diminished resources; if the firm had the deep pockets of Apple, it would have come up with something grander.
TiVo's competitors aren't doing much better in their attempts to create the Perfect Machine. Like TiVo, many competing firms offer users a rich list of features. But implementing those features, and integrating the system with other components you might have in your home, proves difficult.
