MWSF 2003 - TiVo, Aspyr, and Brother Announce Rendezvous Products That Enhance The Digital Hub Experience

by , 7:00 PM EST, January 7th, 2003

TiVo, Aspyr, and Brother all announced several new products that take advantage of Apple's Rendezvous networking technology. These products include a new TiVo service package to play music and view photos from your Mac on your TV, a new printer from Brother, and a new multiplayer game from Aspyr. From the press release:

"Rendezvous is enabling groundbreaking new products from companies like TiVo, Brother and Aspyr," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "These Rendezvous enabled products give consumers the ability to stream audio from iTunes to their home stereo, display iPhotos on their TVs, connect a printer in seconds and eliminate the complexity barriers of playing networked games."

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"TiVo's upcoming premium service package will use Rendezvous technology to automatically discover Macs within the home network and determine which services they provide, allowing customers to listen to their shared music or view their shared photos on their TV," said Jim Barton, co-founder and CTO for TiVo. "We are excited about working with Apple on other ways Rendezvous can help TiVo Series2 DVRs connect to a Mac to deliver future services."

"Brother is proud to ship the first Rendezvous enabled printer perfect for workgroups; the new HL-5070N Laser Printer is completely configured by just turning it on," said Don Cummins, vice president, Brother International Corporation. "It's absolutely great that Apple has created an open standard that gives us a competitive edge in home and small office environments."

"The hottest game on the Mac this past Christmas was Aspyr?s Rendezvous enabled NASCAR Racing 2002 Season," said Michael Rogers, Aspyr's president. "Rendezvous vastly improves the multiplayer network gaming experience by making it easy for players to find and join games on the network. All of our future networked games are going to take advantage of Rendezvous."

More information can be found in the original press release.

The Mac Observer Spin:

TiVo's support for Rendezvous on the Mac really boosts the Mac platform as a digital hub platform. In some ways, even more so than Apple's iApps do. Steve Jobs has said that he doesn't feel that computers will merge with set top boxes. The decision to support existing products like TiVo allows them to do what they they do best, without muddying Apple's own product strategy. It also directly contrasts with Microsoft's own efforts to make the Windows XP Media Center the end-all-be-all product for multimedia. For our money, Apple's got it right: the XP Media Center is an abomination, and the idea of trusting Microsoft with all of our digital content is a frightening one.

The games from Aspyr are also a huge step forward for gaming. With that company's new title's, it's substantially easier to network Macs for gaming than it is on a PC, or even a console. That's a big feather in the Mac platform's hat.

It's a very good thing to see companies gradually releasing products that support Rendezvous, as Apple is basing a lot of it's digital hub strategy on the philosophy of integration encouraged by this zero configuration technology. Assuming this trend will continue, Apple will once again have a sucess again with the adoption of a new technology -- always A Good Thing.

Apple Press Release