Early in 2010, Motorola came to us with a product they called the Mover. The concept was simple. Transcode the users DVR content to MPEG-4, store it on solid state media, and transport it to their devices wirelessly. Physically it was a separate unit, but the plan was that it would be integrated into the leased hardware at some point. The concept was good, and you can see its current implementation in DirecTV’s Nomad, and TiVo to Go.
My team was tasked with designing the applications for iOS and Android (which at the time was basically the iPhone and Droid). The scope for the application required that it see all content available on the home DVRs, allow the user to specifically transfer one or many assets, playback those assets, and then store locally any in-progress data. Because the point of the app was to identify and consume content on your remote device, we decided to create a straightforward productivity type application. The simple list views available from the SDKs allowed us to quickly get content to the device and present it to the user, however the organization of the content proved to be trickier. We didn’t want to fall back on the old standard sort order, ‘by date’. So we worked with the developers to collapse the content into the appropriate series folders by inspecting all the episodes, and moved individual assets with an in-progress point to the top. The last part was to implement our version of parental controls on a device by device basis. Via a settings tab, a parent can set the level of content available to the device, and then PIN protect the configuration.
