June 12, 2010

Virgin's Cindy Rose shares her Digital Dreams

From Saturday's Telegraph:

Cindy Rose, the company’s executive director of digital entertainment, is tasked with delivering [Virgin Media's] vision.
Although Rose did not broker the partnership with Tivo, it’s her job to make sure it’s as transformational as the company hopes. She says that it brings the best of the web to the TV screen, in the form of apps, and offers a search service which is “smarter than Google”.
It is the smart recommendation tools which historically have set Tivo apart from its rivals, pointing users in the direction of programmes the service thinks a user will enjoy based on other Tivo audience members with similar tastes, or previous viewing habits. The Tivo box then downloads these shows, saving them on the hard drive and no distinction is made between content that has been recorded via TV or downloaded via broadband.
There will also be apps such as Spotify pre-loaded onto the service, too – so people can listen to their music, while browsing the TV menu.[...]
Rose thinks high definition will soon replace standard definition fully. Virgin, she’s keen to stress, offers it to customers for no additional charge.
More in the full interview. There's nothing particularly revelatory here (although I didn't know Spotify was in the mix), but it's an interesting read, probably timed to counter the recent Sky announcement regarding its long-promised Internet and On Demand services.

2 comments:

Erich said...

Much nicer.

Also, isn't it time for a new poll? You had one some time ago asking which HD channels people were most looking forward to. Before we get the next batch of Sky and other HD channels, it would be fun to see how the voting would break down, now that people have actually had some time to watch those first HD channels.

Richardr said...

The one concern I have is the more we seem to be told about the TIVO deal, the less it seems that we will be getting the full TIVO service, and instead, just certain "enhancements" to services that should really be there anyway, e.g recommendations, proper search across categories of VOD.