Well, I never thought this day would come. No, not writing another opinion piece, but me actually comparing Apple to TiVo in an opposing style. Yet, with all the hype over this rumored Front Row 2.0 it’s all I can do but compare it to TiVo and see who will own my living room.

Apple is supposedly prepping a release of Front Row with vague-at-this-point DVR-like abilities and is being dubbed a “TiVo Killer.” That remains to be seen, because TiVo just announced in their email newsletter some new features that would set it far, far apart from anything Apple’s added to Front Row.

While the new Front Row may have some basic DVR abilities, or perhaps even let you skim the music store or whatnot from your chair (or couch if you have the 20” screen), TiVo will soon let you check weather, traffic, and even buy movie tickets without leaving the TV set. Add in Podcasting and Live365 music and a photo browser for Yahoo! Photos, and every service that Galleon provides and TiVo is simply more mature as far as a living room media product goes.

I don’t doubt Front Row will have its place in my life, somehow, but at this point I’m not seeing it killing off TiVo, or even hurting it. In fact, with the goodies that TiVo is adding I’m seeing it having a stronger and stronger presence as the days go by. If you have a TV and broadband, TiVo should be your very next thought here in a couple of weeks. Add in a home server to archive recordings and provide services TiVo isn’t serving and you’re even better off.

We’ll know for sure what Front Row has for us come Macworld, possibly, but I’m not of the opinion that it’ll make me scrap the TiVo. At absolute best it will make me use another input on my TV. At worst, I’ll just stick with what I have now: two iBooks and an older G4 as a home server.

Now, what would be a TiVo killer? A Front Row API. Make Front Row capable of handling third-party gadgets like TiVo can. They could be online services or new video or audio viewers, or anything. Learn from Dashboard: developers like new venues. With this, we could have a ton of gadgets in Front Row, like TiVo has now, and have the full computational power of a computer behind it (TiVo’s applications are network-based and require the server to do the thinking for the TiVo). Make it robust enough and just about anything that could use the remote as input would be possible (RSS, weather, traffic, minor games, remote server or network monitors, etc.). In fact, you could leverage the screen saver or Quartz Composer systems to do this now with little effort.

Come on, Apple, let us play, too. I don’t want two things hooked up to my TV; I want the iMac to be the TV.