TiVo + BlackBerry = Slingbox killer?

There's no TiVo-branded video streaming app for mobile phones ... not yet, anyway. Yet here we have TiVo and BlackBerry, announcing a "partnership" Thursday at CTIA in San Francisco. Should the folks behind the Slingbox be worried?

First, some preliminaries: Thursday's joint TiVo/BlackBerry announcement of a partnership was just that—an announcement. There's no talk of streaming video for now, and there aren't any TiVo apps for the BlackBerry yet.

According to the press release, we should expect the first app—which would let you check program listings and remotely schedule recordings—"later this year." That said, future apps will "further simplify mobile access to video content."

Naturally, the announcement ("mobile access to video content"??) was enough to start tongues wagging, and why not? The idea of streaming your recording TiVo shows to your BlackBerry—no ungainly Slingbox-type contraption necessary—is a mouth-watering one, and if TiVo and RIM are officially working together, well ... don't you think a video streaming app would be pretty high on the agenda?

Or, here's another possibility: TiVoToGo for the BlackBerry, which—instead of transferring your shows to a laptop—would encode and side-load your shows onto your BlackBerry's microSD card. Sweet.

Of course, a TiVo streaming app—if that's the way TiVo and BlackBerry decide to go—could spell trouble for Sling Media and its Slingbox, which (once attached to your DVR) "slings" videos to your desktop or handheld across the Internet (Windows Media, Symbian, and Palm OS handsets are supported).

Why? Because slinging your shows entails extra hardware on top of your DVR, and at $129 and up, Slingboxes ain't cheap.

Then again, a TiVo app won't do you much good if you're not using a TiVo DVR—and the beauty of Slingbox, of course, is that it works with any DVR with analog outputs.

All the "will TiVo plus BlackBerry kill the Slingbox?" talk aside (and frankly, I've a feeling the two would co-exist), I think a TiVo-streaming BlackBerry app—or for any smartphone, for that matter—would be a smashing idea. If only they'd build one.

Related:
RIM & TiVo Partner to Provide TiVo Mobile Entertainment Services on BlackBerry Smartphones [PR Newswire]