• by Shankar Gupta , June 8, 2006

Digital television provider TiVo will soon begin carrying webcasts from popular sites around the Web. The ads in the video encodes will remain intact, said Tara Maitra, TiVo vice president and general manager for programming.

TiVo also plans to partner with publishers to sell advertising packages. "The content is going to be made available as part of a TiVo subscription. The programmers can deliver it to us with advertising," Maitra said. "Depending on the relationship with the partner, there are going to be opportunities where we'll be jointly selling advertising packages."

However, viewers on TiVo will be able to exercise one of the main draws of the system--fast-forwarding the ads. The Webcast content will be remastered as well, so that the quality of the video will be TV-quality or better, regardless of the quality of the webcasts on the publisher's sites.

The publishers in the package include the NBA, the WNBA, The New York Times, Heavy.com, iVillage, Rocketboom, and CNET. TiVo is carrying such content as news analysis from the Washington, D.C. bureau of The New York Times, popular broadband TV shows from Heavy.com like "Behind the Music that Sucks," and Rocketboom's daily news and political commentary.

The initiative stems from a deal made in May with broadband video technology firm Brightcove, which is providing some of the content from its network of publisher partners, as well as the technology for the webcasts.