TiVo offers new service to its customers

TiVo Inc reported on Wednesday that it would deliver videos from Google Inc's popular Web site YouTube directly to television screens via its digital video recorders.

TiVo said the service would be available later this year for high-speed Internet subscribers who have TiVo Series3 DVRs. It said that users would be able to log onto their YouTube accounts directly from their TiVo boxes.

TiVo is a brand of digital video recorder (DVR) in the United States and Canada. It is a consumer video device that captures television programming to hard disk storage for later viewing ("time shifting"). The device also provides an electronic television programming schedule, and provides recording options based on that schedule.

TiVo gets program information for the next two weeks, program description, regular and guest actors, directors, genres, whether programs are new or repeats, and whether broadcast is in HD. Information is updated daily from Tribune Media Services.

TiVo, Inc. was incorporated on August 4, 1997 as "Teleworld, Inc." by Jim Barton and Mike Ramsay, veterans of Silicon Graphics and Time Warner's Full Service Network digital video system. Originally intending to create a home network device, they later developed the idea to record digitized video on a hard disk.

YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created in mid-February 2005 by three former PayPal employees. The San Bruno-based service uses Adobe Flash technology to display a wide variety of video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video logging and short original videos.