Why the sudden interest in a renewed partnership? Could be the recent change in management at DirecTV, which was taken over by Liberty Media (LINTA) in an $11 billion asset swap with News Corp. (NWS) (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and of this Web site). Or could it be that DirecTV simply saw the writing on the wall after TiVo successfully sued Dish for infringing on its patented time-warp technology?

Perhaps a little of both, hmm?

Tom Rogers, a well-rounded media executive, has had his work cut out for him at TiVo (TIVO), the iconic but often-struggling pioneer and leader in the digital video-recorder market. Before coming to TiVo, Mr. Rogers was chairman and CEO of Primedia, which publishes 200 magazines, operates more than 400 Web sites and runs a wide range of television and video businesses. Previous to that, he was president of NBC Cable and executive vice president at NBC, as well as its chief strategist. While there, Mr. Rogers helped found the CNBC business cable channel and established the NBC/Microsoft cable channel and Internet joint venture, MSNBC. He also worked in politics, as senior counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Telecommunications, Consumer Protection and Finance Subcommittee, and has previously worked as a Wall Street lawyer.

• Tom Rogers’s interview is prefaced by a video introduction clip from “The Simpsons.” In it, Keith Olbermann accuses Marge Simpson of being a content thief for using her TiVo to watch TV without commercials.
• Kara welcomes Rogers to the stage. She recalls being at the TiVo pitch meeting “with a bunch of dumb dot-com guys,” notes that she felt it was a huge idea at the time but hasn’t proven an easy business for the company.

  

• Rogers begins by recalling his time at NBC and how his last act at the company was to make it an investor in TiVo.
• What was TiVo when you arrived? Rogers says there was a view that it was a great device with a lot of potential. I looked at that as a student of the broadcast and cable industries, he says, and thought that we couldn’t succeed as an island apart from those industries. We had to work with them, even if TiVo was initially viewed as a means for consumers to take power back from the TV industry. We had to weave TiVo into those industries.
• Kara insists that the major concept behind TiVo is really skipping commercials. “I can pause TV and go to the bathroom and skip the commercials when I come back.”
• Rogers, it seems, would prefer to refer to that as “giving consumers control of their TV experience,” rather that what it really is.
• Kara circles back: “How do you get rid of this image of TiVo as a content thief?”

• Rogers finally answers: “We went to the TV industry and told them that it was ‘game over’ in terms of people watching commercials. We told them that there was one thing we know about our users: They fast-forward through ads. So what can we do?” The answer, Rogers says, is the creation of a new ad model that addresses this. We conceived of a number of solutions for this–ads that appear while users fast-forward, others that appear on the device’s save menu.
• Kara presses Rogers again: “I don’t think I’ve ever watched an ad on my TiVo. … Ever.”
• Rogers dodges a bit, noting that Kara’s just one user. He stresses that we need to get away from the Nielsen notion that whoever watches a show also watches the ads: “We’ve come up with a measurement solution that allows us to tell exactly how many people are watching ads and for how long.”
• And what you discovered was that …. nobody watches ads? Kara asks.
• No, they do, Rogers counters. Clearly, he thinks the Nielsen model is and always was a bunch of bollocks. He again stresses the need for accountability in advertising metrics. TiVo, he says, can offer that.
• So what can you actually tell advertisers about their ads? asks Kara. Rogers says they can tell them what works and what doesn’t work, what shows ads performed the best in and the ones in which they performed the worst.

• So, Kara interjects, what TiVo is really trying to do is to tell the TV industry: Hey, we’re disrupting your industry. Now, can we sell you some data?
• Rogers notes that a great deal of the content recorded to TiVo is broadcast programming. What’s interesting, he notes, is that the highest-rated commercials of the week don’t often appear in the most-watched programs. That’s where TiVo comes in. It can determine what ads work, where they work, and when.
• Rogers talks now about user engagement and interactive advertising. We’ve heard people touting interactive advertising for years, and it’s always failed. Why? Because people don’t want to interact with ads while they’re watching their TV programs. You can, however, engage them in advertising interactions during “pause,” he says.
• Conversation turns to IP suits and TiVo’s recent litigation against EchoStar. Rogers rehashes the whole thing for those of you just joining us … He stresses that the injunctive relief the court has granted TiVo is very far-reaching. So does that mean TiVo’s going to sue more people? Kara asks. Likely, though clearly Rogers isn’t going to admit that.
• What about your relationship with the cable industry? Rogers says TiVo has adopted a “join ‘em” strategy here. He would prefer to provide the industry with its software, rather than hardware. Much easier for TiVo and the cable industry to implement. Compares the consumer experience to that of adding HBO. Just call your local cable company, say “Hey, I’d like TiVo instead of the DVR I currently have.”
• What’s the role of the TiVo box today? Does it still have one? Kara wonders. Rogers says yes. It allows us to talk directly to the consumer. He describes TiVo’s evolution into a content retrieval mechanism–movies, TV, music, YouTube, etc. What works for the consumer is a one-box solution to media. We’ve been building that solution for years.
• Who owns that box? asks Kara. No one yet, says Rogers. But we’re close to it.
• But selling a consumer device is hard, notes Kara. Rogers concedes, but notes that the cable industry is looking for exactly the sort of solution he’s describing. Once someone provides it, they’ll embrace it and drive it forward.
• Kara’s a little incredulous. Rogers notes that the stage is set for just this sort of shift, noting that at this very moment, Comcast is rolling out a TiVo initiative in New England that includes a jointly branded welcome screen.
• How do you look at the broadcast industry these days, asks Kara. The broadcast industry has it within its power to avoid some very dark days, Rogers replies. Whether it will move quickly enough to avoid them remains to be seen. Rogers says the situation is identical to the one that print faced years ago and clearly did not bother to avoid. He seems to think that the broadcast industry is a bit more on the ball than print. Not sure whether it will avoid those dark days, though.
• Q&A: Issue of cable cards? There’s no reason in the world that cable companies can’t send it to you and have you insert it, Rogers says. There’s lots of friction there. But cable companies, he says, are instituting a much better customer experience.
• More options for viewing TV content, such as the PC? “Clearly, there are more ways to watch TV,” Rogers says. “But I have to tell you, when you see the number of flat-screens flying out of retailers, the TV set and its primary position in the home isn’t going anywhere in the future.”
• When is TiVo going to launch in U.K.? I’m hopeful that we can soon, Rogers says.
• What vendors will deliver to TiVo? Rogers says there isn’t a video packager that isn’t talking to TiVo. As for the major players? I don’t have a view of who’s going to dominate, Rogers adds. It’s too early. On-demand model is all that can be forecast for the time being.

What about ease of use? TiVo wireless adapters are good, Rogers responds, acknowledging there’s nevertheless a multi-set issue: You still need a second box. But we’re working on a whole-home model, he adds.

For more coverage, see The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s Tech Trader Daily.

A note about our coverage: This live blog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations expeditiously written and posted to the Web as quickly as we were able. It was not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

Lest there be any doubt that DVR functionality was purposefully left out of Apple TV, consider this patent recently unearthed by AppleInsider. Filed in October of 2006, the patent describes not just a version of Apple TV capable of browsing and recording live TV programming, but a touch-based remote that could be preloaded with upcoming TV listings to facilitate it. From the patent:

For example, program data for upcoming programs, e.g., for the next month, can be downloaded and stored on the remote control device. Thereafter, a user of the remote control device can search programs that are to be broadcast and determine which programs to record. The recording settings can be programmed onto the remote control device, and then be provided to the video device when a data communication is established between the remote control device and the video device.”

Pretty slick, eh? Lots of additional possibilities here as well. One could easily imagine the iPod Touch and iPhone serving as the remote the patent describes. And if this next-generation Apple TV is capable of recording TV programming, why not make it the gateway through which such programming is delivered? How nice would it be to subscribe to HBO–and HBO alone–via iTunes? How nice would it be to subscribe to a season of “Weeds”? Or to a commercial-free season of “The Office” and skip everything else NBC has to offer? How nice would it be if the latest unwatched episode of “Weeds” on your Apple TV was automatically synced to your iPhone for later viewing? How nice would it be if new films opened on iTunes the same day they opened in theaters?

Pipe dream? Perhaps. Certainly, these scenarios would require Apple (AAPL) to ink some fantastical new licensing deals with Hollywood. And the two aren’t exactly seeing eye-to-eye all the time these days. Still, you never know. Stranger things have happened.

And like the technologies themselves, digital jargon changes and expands all the time. Just when you thought you’d mastered stuff like RAM (computer memory) and GSM (the cellphone technology invented in Europe), new terms pop up like weeds on your lawn.

So here’s a quick and dirty glossary designed to make holiday shopping for the latest tech products feel less like taking the SATs.

Computers

Some of the newest terminology to know when you’re shopping for a computer, whether it be a Windows PC or an Apple Macintosh, involves the processor, the chip that’s the brain of the box. Until recently, most consumer computers had a single processor. Now it’s common to find them with so-called dual cores, which in effect means two processors packaged into one chip. Two cores won’t make your word processing or email go any faster, but they do potentially give you more horsepower for such heavy-duty tasks as gaming or video editing. I say “potentially,” because to make the most of a dual-core processor, you need software that sends some work to each core, and most programs are not yet designed to do that.

The labeling of these new processors is also confusing. Intel called its first consumer laptop dual-core chip the “Core Duo”; now there’s a second generation known as the “Core 2 Duo.” (In techland, apparently, the “2 Duo” moniker is assumed to be crystal clear.) And there are still some single-core Intel processors, dubbed “Core Solo.”

For laptops in general, one of the latest terms you’ll encounter is “ExpressCard,” which refers to the new version of that slot on the side of the machine into which you can pop a wireless receiver or some other add-on. For years these slots have adhered to a standard called “PC Card,” but the latest laptops are showing up with slots that follow the new ExpressCard standard. Worse yet for confused consumers, it comes in two flavors: a narrower one called ExpressCard/34, and a wider one called ExpressCard/54. And naturally, neither can accept cards designed for the older, PC Card standard.

Cellphones

One hardly knows where to begin when talking about cellphone jargon. But an obvious source of confusion is the baffling nomenclature being given to the various new high-speed cellphone networks that can transmit a wide assortment of material — music, video clips and web sites — to phones at speeds rivaling home broadband.

If you’re shopping for a phone at Verizon or Sprint, the high-speed capability is called “EVDO” or “EV-DO” (which stands for Evolution Data Only or Evolution Data Optimized). At Cingular, it’s known as “HSDPA” (for High-Speed Downlink Packet Access).

Since T-Mobile doesn’t have a network in this speed class, salespeople there will brag instead about “EDGE” (Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution), which, despite its aspirational name, is a much slower technology.

TV

Buying a television used to be simple. No more. There’s a whole new vocabulary for digital TV shopping. It’s too expansive to cover completely in this space, but here are a few select terms.

In addition to the familiar plasma and LCD (liquid crystal display) sets, which have an expensive digital panel at the front, there’s now a third type of screen, called a “microdisplay.” This is actually a rear-projection television, although much skinnier than the old behemoths. There are three main microdisplay types. Each uses a different sort of very small digital circuit in the rear of the set to generate the picture, which is then projected onto the large screen at the front. And naturally, each has its own jargony name. The first, called “DLP” (digital light processing), uses a special chip loaded with minuscule mirrors. The second, confusingly called “LCD,” uses a tiny LCD chip. The third, “LCoS” (liquid crystal on silicon), is sort of a hybrid of the other two, in that it uses both liquid crystals and mirrors.

And don’t forget the digital video recorder — the now almost mandatory add-on used to record and save programs on hard disks inside cable and satellite receivers or inside a stand-alone unit — which unfortunately goes by two names. Sometimes it’s called a “DVR” (digital video recorder) and sometimes a “PVR” (personal video recorder), but really, they’re the same thing. You might even hear the technology referred to as “TiVo,” which is actually the best-known brand of digital video recorder. Think of TiVo as the Kleenex of DVRs — its name is sometimes used as a generic term for the whole category.

Wireless

Wi-Fi wireless networks are now pretty familiar. Many people even know they come in two main speeds, designated by letters. The “b” variety, which was the first version to gain public acceptance, was succeeded by the “g” variety, which is faster and backwards-compatible with “b.”

Nice and simple, right? Not for long. Chaos has come to the Wi-Fi world in the form of a new standard,”n,” which is supposedly even faster than “g” and, more important, offers longer range. The problem is, the engineering committee that sets such standards has been taking forever to certify “n,” so companies have begun selling Wi-Fi gear that purports to use the “n” standard in some form but may not be compatible with it when it finally emerges. Last year there were “pre-n” products, which used some parts of the emerging standard; this year there are “draft-n” products, based on a draft of the proposed “n” standard. Stay tuned for the real thing.

But the most important Wi-Fi term of the moment is “MIMO,” short for multiple-input multiple-output. This is a technique that can greatly improve range and speed by capturing formerly stray parts of a wireless signal and merging them. It is expected to be a key component of the “n” standard, but is already in some “g” products, as well as in the “pre-n” and “draft-n” products.

Broadband

There are two main types of high-speed Internet service: DSL (digital subscriber line) is sold by phone companies, while cable modem service is sold by cable companies. Most people know these terms.

But now there’s a third type, called “fiber optic,” being sold in some parts of the country. This technology uses glass fibers, lit up by a laser and connected directly to your home. (Some other systems use fiber under the street, but not running right up to the house.) The best-known brand of fiber-to-the-home broadband service is Verizon’s “FiOS,” which can deliver TV channels as well as the Internet.

All broadband service providers boast about their speed, and they tend to do so in techie jargon. Slower broadband is measured in kilobits per second, abbreviated as “kbps.” Faster speeds are clocked as megabits per second, or “mbps.” (Note that these terms end in bit, not byte. The latter ending is normally used as a measure of storage capacity, not speed.) One megabit equals 1,000 kilobits. So a DSL line that tops out at 768 kilobits per second, for example, isn’t nearly as fast as one that registers three megabits per second.

Music

Almost everybody knows that MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3) is the most common format for digital music files. But what is AAC? And how about WMA?

All of the above are compressed formats, meaning they take a song that would occupy lots of space on a disk and squeeze it down to a fraction of its original size while trying to preserve the sound. AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) is an industry-standard music-compression format favored by Apple, while WMA (Windows Media Audio) is a proprietary music-compression format that is owned and used by Microsoft. Which of the three you prefer depends on your taste.

Both AAC and WMA are available in two versions. One is an “open” version, which gets created when consumers convert their CDs into these digital formats, and imposes no restrictions on usage. The second is an encrypted, or copy-protected, version, which includes code that restricts how often and under what circumstances the song can be played or copied. Songs sold at Apple’s iTunes Music Store are in the encrypted version of AAC, while songs sold by music services that use Microsoft software are sold in the encrypted version of WMA, meaning there are limits to what you can do with these files.