iSee iTunes

TiVo recently announced the winners of their first developers contest with top prize (a Segway) going to the creator of iSee iTunes. The app runs on your machine (Windows or OS X) and communicates to your TiVo by telling it what titles you're playing in iTunes. You see album title, track title, artist and album artwork. You can control what's played on your computer via your TiVo remote including rating the track playing. Very, very nifty.

This was my first chance to interact with my computer from my tv/entertainment system and it was thrilling. This made me want to access my whole DVD collection with a click of the remote. For the first time, today I watched some of Apple's H.264 samples as they now have 480p resolution samples that my PowerBook can play. Spectacular. An iTunes type movie store could allow pay per view or purchase movies for unlimited viewing. There's really no reason for me to need physical DVDs for the movies I own. They should just be stored out there in the network somewhere.

OK, I know I'm not talking about anything new. The rumors have been flying for while that Netflix will offer this sort of a service with TiVo and Apple will launch an iMovies store. But seeing this functionality getting closer and closer to reality is exciting.