TiVo announces PSP, video iPod support

As TiVo addicts will attest to, one drawback of the digital video recording service is its tendency to incapacitate viewers, chaining them to the boob tube as they struggle to catch up on hours of saved programming.

Now those hours spent away from the television don't have to be wasted as they were in the past. TiVo today announced that it is enhancing its current TiVoToGo feature to allow subscribers to easily transfer video files from their TiVo units to popular portable media devices like Sony's PSP and Apple's iPod. So when gamers tire of playing Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex on the PSP, they can fire up an episode of the TV show instead.

There are a couple of wrinkles of note to the technology, primarily that subscribers will need to buy new software to transfer the files over to their iPods or PSPs. Also, the technology will "watermark" the files so that they can be traced back to the originating account.

TiVo will begin testing the feature with select subscribers next week. A complete rollout of the feature is expected around the first quarter of next year.