Yesterday, LeAnn and I adjusted a setting on her firewall that opened up some features on her TiVo that we previously had not been able to access. This includes a few games, movie previews, and a built in podcast player. Of course, the first thing I did was tap in the feed url of my blog on the remote, and it found my one and only podcast post. There is also a directory of feeds similar to ones that top the charts at the iTunes Store.
I think this is cool feature heading in the right direction, but the usability still has a long way to go. First, typing in a long feed url letter by letter into the remote is a pain, and once the url ran off the screen so we could not read what LeAnn was typing. Second, and surprisingly, playback lacks the ability to pause and bloop-bloop (rewind/fast-forward) that you would expect to be the same as watching TV recordings. Third, I couldn’t get it to access this video podcast, but I’m not sure if this is due to the fact that the site uses Feedburner.
Still, I think this is great step in bringing web 2.0 into the living room, and from what I’ve heard the Comcast DVR doesn’t yet have anything like this.