TiVo, as it promised, has introduced an app for the Fire TV that lets its users watch shows and movies recorded to the DVR on the Amazon-made OTT device.
Ira Bahr, TiVo’s chief marketing officer, told the TiVo Community Forum last week that the app, currently carrying the beta label, would arrive sometime this week.
Dave Zatz of the ZatzNotFunny blog has already fired it up (the image above is courtesy of Zatz) and has shared his initial observations in this post, and discovered some issues with it.
“Having only played with it about five minutes, my initial observation is that this was clearly designed for or tested against something other than a television given little thought to overscan,” he wrote. “Without adjusting my Fire TV’s settings, elements in the lower left, upper left, and upper right were clipped on my television.”
But he still called the effort a “good start in simplifying interaction for a lean back experience… as the bulk of the app is simply an easily navigated listing of recordings from your linked DVR.”
TiVo has not announced when its app for the Fire TV will support live TV, a capability that is currently supported in the TiVo Mini client.
And time will tell if TiVo decides to push harder on a “TiVo Anywhere “ strategy that could help the company brings its platform to more retail platforms, including gaming consoles and smart TVs, following its decision to convert to the open-source Haxe multiplatform programming language.
Zatz also notes that the new function will require that the primary TiVo device is outfitted with video transcoding – either on board the DVR or via the TiVo Stream sidecar.
