eirikso.com — Yahoodeeo – coming soon? Eirik Solheim reported on it earlier this week, but now it seems official. Yahoo! has bought much of the technology of home digital media concern Meedio.
From Pablo and the Meedio team:
“Today is a big day for the team here at Meedio; we have sold most of our technology to Yahoo!
David Brott, Jeff (beergeek), Kenny (fasttech), Pedro (flea0) and I are joining Yahoo!’s Digital Home team. We’ve had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with Yahoo! in the past few months and we love the way they are developing the best, most user-friendly services for the Digital Home.”
I reported previously on Yahoo!’s new GoTV initiative that they were showing off back in January at CES. So it looks like Yahoo! wants to join the ever crowding field of TiVo, Microsoft and Media Center, Apple and FrontRow, and a horde of other smaller players in dominating your living room. This is good. Competition spurs innovation and while Microsoft may be coming out with an imporoved version of WMP11 for Media Center by June, well, Yahoo! has Flickr and that’s super cool. (Of course with the Flickr add on Slickr I’ve already turned my MCE machine into a living room Flickr box).
For those of you that are unfamiliar with Meedio, they are essentially the television link that Yahoo!’s GoTV initiative was lacking. I reported about them in June of last year here. So what is still missing for Yahoo!? HDTV. While Meedio has an OTA solution for HDTV to the best of my knowledge they don’t have any CableLabs approved technology yet or any deals with the satellite players to broadcast premium satellite HDTV.
With TiVo’s standalone HDTV unit due out later this year and Microsoft’s Vista Home Premium which will have CableCARD support due out early 2007 Yahoo! does have a little bit of time to try and work out the premium HDTV content issue.
Congrats to Meedio and congrats to Yahoo! on getting even more serious about the digital home.