Yahoo hooks up with digital TV

In a move that further blurs the lines of television and the Internet, Yahoo and TiVo have partnered to schedule downloads to TiVo boxes from any Internet connection.

Starting today, consumers will be able to schedule recordings on their TiVo box from a special Yahoo portal. Subscribers would need a valid Yahoo account with a yahoo.com email address as well as a valid TiVo user account.

Additional content sharing between Yahoo and TiVo such as traffic, weather and user photos, is almost assured before the year is out, according to Associated Press reports.

Representatives for Yahoo and TiVo were not immediately available to comment.

Previously code-named Tahiti, the service is designed for TiVo Series2 recorders. TiVo's digital video recorders use hard drives to store large amounts of content and let viewers pause live shows and program their systems to record TV broadcasts and even skip commercials, much like Sky+ in the UK. The company enjoys huge loyalty in the US, but no longer sells its products in the UK. 

From any Yahoo TV episode page, users can click the 'Record to my TiVo box' button, the companies said. The request is automatically sent to your home the next time your TiVo box connects. The companies suggest allowing for one hour of lag time if the TiVo is connected to broadband through a standard home network. Dial-up users have to wait 36 hours for a request to take effect if the TiVo uses dial-up.

TiVo has been in talks with several search engine companies including Yahoo to build a new service that would let consumers search for videos on the Web and then watch them on their television sets.

While practically a household name, TiVo is fighting to match the success of its brand name with a lasting business model in an increasingly competitive personal video recorder (PVR) market.

The company boasts about 3.6 million subscribers, but it has added fewer subscribers to its ranks in the last few months than it had hoped.

TiVo is now looking for additional partnerships to make up for the loss of DirecTV, which said it has plans to cease marketing TiVo's product.

A partnership between TiVo and Yahoo would offer expansion opportunities for both. TiVo has long talked about becoming the 'Google of TV', eventually enabling its more than 3 million subscribers to search for and watch any broadcast or broadband media. Though TiVo opened the door for video downloads straight from the Web, it does not yet offer such a feature.

Meanwhile, Yahoo and Google are investing heavily in video services.

Yahoo signed deals with CNN.com and ABC News in August to expand the content it offers. Yahoo this year also launched a searchable video archive.

Google Video is the company's latest experimental work to archive closed captioning of broadcast television shows and make their content searchable. The beta project launched earlier this year, but it has yet to allow people to watch video clips.