TiVo, Rhapsody Team Up: Is It Worthy Of A Thumbs-Up?

Streaming-music service Rhapsody is now offering its wares via broadband-connected TiVos, and our geeky brothers at Gizmodo have a first run-through around the service. Pluses: Creation of playlists; ability to use the Rhapsody software on your home computer as well as your TiVo. Minuses: You can’t skip back 15 seconds in a song using the loopback button. Well, those are the pluses and minuses on a user-experience level, anyway.

Because while the TiVo interface seems to be a pretty (and neat) way to navigate through Rhapsody’s music catalog, the fact that users will, once their month-long free trials end, have to pay the normal Rhapsody Unlimited subscription fee of $12.99 in order to use the service leads me to believe that the uptake on this partnership will be low; after all, these people are, for the most part^*, already paying a premium to have every episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent automatically recorded when they’re not at home, so why would they want to pay an extra chunk of money for a music service that they didn’t use when it was only available on their computer in the first place? It seems like the allocation of money for subscription-based entertainment would go in one direction or the other–not both. And unless this pairing allows TiVo’s technology of superconvenience to work its way with music–i.e. allow users to stream new albums from artists they’ve put on their wishlists the day they come out, or a music-recommendation engine similar to the TiVo Suggestions feature–the point behind it, aside from some fancy press releases and extra work for the TiVo user-experience team, seems to be little more than two formerly important digital-media brands teaming up in a last gasp to remain relevant.

TiVo Rocks the Rhapsody Music Service [Gizmodo]

^* There are some lifetime-subscription holdouts out there. I’m one of them.