Youtube is coming to a TIVO near you

Just what the television industry needs, increased competition from those wacky YouTube videos that 68 million people watch every month.

Only now, it will be easier than ever to view them on television screens.

Beginning Thursday, TiVo will offer thousands of its subscribers the ability to stream YouTube videos onto their television sets through their broadband-enabled TiVo boxes.

It's TiVo's first deal for streaming online content, though the company has partnerships with 60 Internet sites that provide content to TiVo. Unlike with those relationships, TiVo users won't be able to store YouTube video clips, just watch them and bookmark them for easy retrieval later.

TiVo's most popular Internet content partner thus far is Amazon Unbox, which features rented movies that are downloaded to TiVo set-top boxes for viewing on TV screens just as if they were recorded TV shows.

"Will there be a time when people turn on their TV sets and watch YouTube videos instead of TV shows? Time will tell," Maitra said.

Not in big numbers anytime soon, though, because while TiVo has 3.8 million subscribers, only about a fifth of them have the necessary equipment -- a TiVo Series 3 or TiVo HD -- for grabbing YouTube content and displaying it on TV screens.