Verizon announced plans to offer an iPad app capable of showing television shows in real time to the company’s FiOS subscribers. Due to hit next year, the app will only show live channels at first—no recording or time-shifting just yet. Essentially, it turns your iPad into another TV if you’re a FiOS subscriber.
The service will only work in your home over your FiOS connection, which enables Verizon to verify that you’re using it legally. According to NewTeeVee.com, “the company is now in discussions with content partners to ensure that they’re comfortable with subscribers having the ability to watch their channels on another device that’s not the TV.”
There’s something seriously wrong with any content provider has a problem with this. It’s almost exactly the same as putting a battery-powered portable TV somewhere in your house. If anything, Verizon loses out on the monthly revenue gained by renting an additional FiOS box.
It’d be cool if you could stream recorded shows from your FiOS boxes to your iPad over a 3G connection while on the go but that’s likely a long way off.
Verizon also announced an impending overhaul to its video-on-demand service that will allow people to rent or purchase movies and shows from either their FiOS boxes or Verizon’s web site “and then be downloaded and watched on up to five different PCs and mobile devices,” says NewTeeVee.
That upgrade will roll out toward the end of the year and initially be supported on Android, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry, with iPhone support to follow.
Anything purchased from the service can be deleted from and re-downloaded to any device in the future, which is a nice touch. Verizon also announced an update to its Media Manager PC software, which allows users to stream content from their computers to their TVs. Subscribers now have 70GB of storage space on Verizon’s servers to store their videos, music, and photos.
Okay, your move, Comcast. Multi-room DVR, built-in internet widgets, streaming content from computers–you’ve got plenty to work with here.
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Motorola and Verizon to Offer 10-inch FiOS Android Tablet?
Chrome OS or Android: Which Is It? Google Tablet in November
