Quick Thought: RSS and TiVo

Posted on January 28, 2007

Feed Icon with Headphones I had the pleasure of participating on the Internet and Interactivity panel today at the Chicago Motion Graphics Festival. As most of you know I have become very interested in video on the net after I met a lot of smart folks at PodCamp in Boston back in September so it was great to spend time with a lot of video producers and talk more about what is going on with video on the net and about feeds (which were new to a lot of folks).

The quick thought I want to share with you came from a co-panelist of mine, Nick Schmidt. We were talking a bit about how feeds are enabling the distribution of video on the net and Nick brought up a nice comparison to describe feeds. Nick described feeds to the audience as something similar to your TiVo.

Nick went on to say that, like your TiVo, through feeds you can tell programs like iTunes what content you want by subscribing to the feed of that content and the feed will bring you the latest content as it comes out. It’s a great way to think about feeds and I thank Nick for the comparison.

What’s also interesting about TiVo and feeds is that I believe you can now subscribe to content via feeds with your TiVo. Hopefully that will open up web based content and feeds to a whole new group of people. In the end of the day feeds allow you to get only the content (text, audio, video) you want and consume it when and where you want. Pretty sweet, eh?

If you like your TiVo and haven’t given feeds a try I urge you to do so. Plus, the vast majority of the content is free so there’s nothing to lose. Check out Network2 for some great web video you can subscribe to.