TiVo: Bring us a Mobile Website, Please!

Here’s a proposal for the folks at TiVo: build a lightweight website for us TiVo fans to use to schedule online programs.

The TiVo website has evolved into a truly great way to find and record programs, but a good portion of the time us TiVo users want to set something to record, we’re just not in front of a computer. We’re out and about. But we do have our smart phones.

OK, I know, TiVo and RIM partnered a few weeks ago to bring TiVo-something to Blackberry, and most likely, that will be online scheduling. And before that, TiVo inked a deal with Verizon to do the same for Verizon phones. But why be proprietary about this? Isn’t the key to make this work for TiVo users, no matter what other technology they have?

In a time when the iPhone is gaining a huge amount of market share, and Android phones will probably also steal a huge piece of the action from RIM and the rest of the crowd, doesn’t it make sense to just have a fast-loading, slimmed down website for online scheduling? I’m not advocating an iPhone app or an Android app (although those would be great, too), just a quick way to get logged in, choose that show you forgot to record, and be done.

TiVo recently redesigned their website, and it looks great and has excellent functionality – from a computer. But all of that functionality came by adding a lot of AJAX and, on a mobile device, that can be painful. Just logging in to the site is arduous. Typing an email address in TiVo’s login box is especially painful on an iPhone.

You don’t even need a special domain name for it, but it seems like your neighbor across the bay has already registered tivo.mobi, so maybe they’re working on this?

So how about it?