TiVo and Amazon.com Announce New Service Enabling Amazon Unbox Video Downloads to TiVo: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance Tivo and Amazon.com have announced a partnership to allow you to download movies on your TiVo from Amazon.com.
This might be great news as it gives another feature, video on demand, to the TiVo owner. You will be able to purchase TV episodes for $1.99 and rent movies for $1.99 or puchase them for $9.99 to $14.99.
Personally I’m not quite sure that I get the episodes for $1.99 pitch. Unless I screw something up on my TiVo, chances are I’m already getting all the TV shows I want for free. But I suppose in that rare moment when you kick yourself for somehow screwing up your recording of Lost, it would be nice to have.
Movies are nice and will be useful for most people. Personally I just subscribe to HBO and then have my TiVo record a bunch of movies off of HBO each month (in crystal clear high-def). While I may not get as wide a selection, there is generally a consistent stream of first run movies and lots of other 2nd tier stuff worth recording.
The biggest question about the service, which is only in beta and not available yet, is the quality of the recordings. I have not seen anywhere yet that these will be HDTV copies.
For sure I would not be interested in paying for and downloading movies or TV shows in standard “near DVD” quality when I could simply tell my TiVo to record all my TV and a lot of movies from HBO in high def.
It is interesting that TiVo and Netflix never got their deal done. A few years back TiVo had formally begun a partnership with Netflix that ended up fizzling into the air. I always liked the idea of TiVo and Netflix and thought that they were both strong niche brands that would have benefited from working something out.
Of course Netflix is now letting you watch downloaded movies for free as part of their subscription (but only to your PC) so maybe the economic incentive in the end is better with Amazon where customers would be charged.
The bigger problem with this program (and speaking just for me personally here now) is time. With an increasing availability of where to spend my leisure time, I’m watching less and less movies and TV anyways. I might catch an episode of Law and Order SVU every now and again, or catch something that’s on in the background at my house, but with my digital photography, flick, Zooomr, blogging, music, YouTube, etc. I find I have less and less time for consuming content on my TV anyways. And at present my quad tuner TiVo does more than a good enough job for me at loading up stuff for me to watch for free.
I’m also assuming that, like most things TiVo, the fact that I’m using a DirecTV TiVo leaves me out in the cold on this one and that this service is only available to TiVo Series II and III.
More from Davis Freeberg and PVR Blog.
I’m curious: how are you able to record HDTV with a DirecTiVo unit? I’ve got a DirecTiVo but it’s only standard def. I thought you had to go to the DirecTV HDTV DVR (which I’m reluctant to do based on the anecdotes about the user interface) before you could record HDTV that way.
And how did you get a quad-tuner DirecTiVO device? I didn’t know those existed, either.
Nice post! You have said it very well. Keep going.