Open letter to TiVo: I Want my Apple TV

Here's Robert Scoble's take on Apple TV: It rocks, he says. Why? Because he can watch his video podcasts in it.

TiVo had until February to provide the video podcast aggregation feature now available through iTunes and Apple TV. Instead, you wasted time with "TiVoCasts", with limited selection of questionable taste.

Here's what you guys need to understand: the trick to retain the living room is to provide enough features so that your customers won't seek new devices to fill their needs. In the case of videoblogs, you had until February to come up with that feature, because now we have Apple TV.

And now I want one. Once I have it, all bets are off. I may be tempted to buy videos from iTunes instead of from Amazon Unbox and I may even decide to get rid of my TiVo box as a result. You had me as a loyal customer, but by not providing the features I needed, you pushed me towards your competitors.

Smart.

And let me push this one point further: I have way too many media devices already. Soon I'll be looking at getting rid of one or more of them. By pushing me to buy an Apple TV through inaction and bad decisions such as "TiVoCasts", you increase my need to get rid of something and of TiVo being the box to be ditched.