Smart Kids Over At TiVo. And Google Is Watching.

Regardless of what you call it, the new thinking about the web, for me, is to second guess gut instinct. When you are building things, the gut instinct is to bring everyone to you and to hold everyone inside your world for as long as possible. Now a lot of people talk about the choices consumers have. But I am not sure everyone really believes it. You have no choice but to look at things from a consumer's point of view now. The ease that one can switch between content on devices like television and computers and then traverse from device to device means that you need to have an obsession with what a lot of consumers will do or like.

I believe TiVo is the embodiment of this philosophy.

In a world where I feel like you have to trade off on so many things (Buy the iPhone - great features BUT no 3G access to use them properly and no iChat), TiVo are constantly evolving to organize and connect content that you want to enjoy. It is not long before they will extend that obsession to applications. Every time I look up they are bringing out something cool that you wished you could do. Today I read that TiVo are releasing a feature to subscribe to your favorite web video content as well.

TiVo is to the video world, what Google is to the text based web world. I still think there might be some deal in place already but Google want TiVo to do as many deals as possible before being part of Google. TiVo could be Google's trojan horse into major media companies.