gadgets: Ba-boop! Pizza’s here!

I thought it was bad when there were talks to add a “pizza” button to World of Warcraft. Thankfully that never came about, but apparently they’re still marketing easy pizza access to people without having to get up. From a recent TiVo press release:

November 17, 2008 — TV has never tasted this good. That’s because TiVo Inc., the creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders (DVRs), and Domino’s Pizza, Inc., the recognized world leader in pizza delivery, have teamed up to give broadband connected TiVo subscribers the ability to order pizza for delivery or pick-up, and track delivery timing, right from their TV sets using the TiVo® service. It’s a service that cooks up the perfect pizza purchasing recipe.

I’ve used a few “logon through TiVo” services, and they’re a pain. Just like mobile/internet-powered devices may be encouraging the simplification of passwords, it’s a hassle to enter in user details and passwords with your TiVo remote. Additionally, any TiVo application that has to access the internet, even with a wired connection, is still pretty slow. I tried to order movie tickets through it once and in a time trial against my computer, texting or calling, it would have lost out against all three.

I gotta wonder if we’re headed towards the combination toilet/easy chair/televisions featured in Idiocracy. I’m curious to try this out, except that I don’t really like Domino’s pizza. It could be good for a chuckle, but I’d rather see them deliver more useful information and services to the screen. Right now you’re pretty much limited to shopping–pizza, Amazon, movie tickets–and all of those applications are interrupts to the normal TV viewing. But perhaps pizza is a good gateway drug to new innovations. It was always the fuel for my research and studies back in school.