At WeaKnees, we’ve always wanted better access to the  letter-entry screens on our TiVos. Originally, we wanted this for finding shows, and creating Season Passes and WishLists.

But now, with the amount of Video on Demand available on these units, it’s becoming untenable to either use a remote with just directional keys, or to shuttle back and forth between a computer or smartphone and a TiVo.

Seems we’re not alone. This NYTimes article talks about a study comparing Amazon VOD to Netflix Streaming (both happily available on many TiVo DVRs) and the while the main conclusion of the small study is that each offering works for a different group of people, each group was united in their need for a better way to manage the possibilities of the video to be streamed.

Enter, the TiVo keyboard. Except, it doesn’t exist. And there are no IR codes for it. Yes, you can do more and more from a computer or a smartphone, but we love our TiVos! We want to do this right in the TiVo interface! Give the people what they want!

We haven’t tried it yet, but according to Engadget, you can now pay to stream movies from Blockbuster on your TiVo.

Really, this isn’t a whole lot different from the Amazon Video On Demand (formerly Unbox) streaming that has been available for a few years, but it is different from Netflix streaming in three key ways: it costs money, there is a wider selection of movies, and it’s available on Series 2 units.

The latest info about this that we could find on TiVo’s site is still a signup page for info. That’s here. So maybe this is still in the early rollout phase.

We’ll post more info as we learn more about the service, but it’s great to know that TiVo is now the gateway to even more video for your living room!

TiVo has definitely done well defending their intellectual property against DISH/EchoStar – to the tune of over $100M so far – and potentially more is coming.

Now TiVo has included AT&T and Verizon in the list of companies infringing on their patents. See the press release here.

Sounds like there’s more info coming in their conference call, live now.

While we’re on the theme of what customers want but they can’t get, we should put to rest another request: the DirecTV TiVo with DVD.

Yesterday’s installment concerned the request for an HD TiVo with DVD. That one can’t work at this point and probably in the future for technical reasons.

But the idea of a DirecTV DVR with an integrated DVD burner really, really could work for technical reasons. The issue here is more about copyright, and, in general, DirecTV’s unwillingness to push the envelope with content providers.

Why is this different from a standard TiVo with DVD which does, in fact, exist? The big reason is that on the Humax models that we sell (and on the older Pioneer and Toshiba TiVo models with DVD) the recordings are made from analog inputs. That means that the quality, while very good, isn’t quite as good as the all-digital quality of recordings to DirecTV TiVos and other DVRs and the HD TiVos with CableCARDs. If you take that all-digital signal and pump it to a DVD, then you’ve basically got a digital copy that’s pretty amazing. DirecTV doesn’t want to be the gatekeeper on that.

Of course, if that’s what you really want – all digital copy to a DVD – then there is a way to do it, just not with DirecTV. You can get a standalone TiVo or HD TiVo and copy your shows over a network to your PC or Mac, then burn them there. But DirecTV won’t help you there – at least, so far. There’s a chance that the upcoming DirecTV HD TiVo will have networking features . . .