Two big consumer devices announced podcasting support this week. Sony's PSP firmware 2.60 supports RSS enclosures. The new feature is only able to stream content found in podcast feeds. With built-in wifi, though, that might not be so bad. It also adds a few million new potential listeners to the audience.

TiVo's announcements made a bigger splash: through its content partnership with Yahoo, TiVo Series 2 devices now offer a section for podcasts, with listings taken from the Yahoo Podcasts site. What's more, TiVo, whose talks with Apple broke off recently, announced it will support the iPod as a TiVo-To-Go device sometime in early 2006. It's sort of a funny juxtaposition, from the podcaster's perspective: first, we get into the set-top box, which was the domain of broadcast and cable; and next, broadcast and cable get onto the iPod. That's a fair trade, I'd say.

There's just one problem. The greatest potential for TiVo's podcast support is in downloading video in RSS enclosures. At the moment, I've been pulling down video feeds and running them through a transcoder so my TiVo's MPEG-2 decoder can handle them. (Sidebar: video transcoders are going to be the fastest-growing software segment in 2006. Write it down.) But the TiVo box itself doesn't have much processing power, and its hardware MPEG-2 decoder can only handle a narrow range of bitrates (2-8Mbit/sec), all of which are pretty big in size. Most video feeds are much smaller, but with MPEG-4 and especially the H.264 format used on the iPod, they take a lot more horsepower to render than the TiVo will be able to muster.

This, like most great opportunities, has a big barrier sitting in front of it. I don't think a lot of videobloggers will want to make their work available at a minimum of 10MB per minute of video. Something will have to be done to get video feeds to work well with the TiVo, even if it involves using the companion TiVo Desktop software to transcode for the time being. There is too much good stuff that would be well-received if only it could jump from the laptop screen to the living room TV.

And that's the big message of both the Sony and TiVo announcements: convergence. Sony's device is the second-hottest electronic device on the market today, and they have responded with an upgrade to support podcasts (and Windows Media) to showcase the PSP as a convergence device. TiVo's announcements have convergence practically written all over them. They and Yahoo are making a play for the coveted "digital hub": the device that brokers media and services to you from your home. Expect more of this kind of announcement over the next six to twelve months, from Microsoft for the Xbox 360, Sony for the PlayStation 3, and probably Apple for a new Mac-mini-based media center. They've all been looking at this space for years.