Tivo and Amazon to partner over Unbox?
From TechCrunch -
Amazon is reportedly in talks with Tivo to enable movies downloaded from the Amazon Unbox service to be sent to TV sets via the Tivo.
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I’m a Tivo user. I have two of them, actually…but even as a Tivo User, I’m sure I’m into this idea. As the article states, “Unbox is widely seen as a technical disaster.”
First off, I don’t need ANYTHING else slowing my Tivo down. There are ads, widgets, and ads masked as widgets all over my Tivo that want to do everything from give me the weather to designing my own Lexus. I don’t want to design my own Lexis…I want to watch TV.
I think a VOD downloading system for Tivo would be fantastic, but I’m not interested in Amazon’s crippled Unbox product. I, like the rest of the world, would love to be able to just download the movies (or tv shows) that I want to watch and burn the things to DVD…but it seems the industry just can’t handle that idea…after all…people might STEAL their movies…because…ya know, right now that’s not happening at all….
[…] We heard rumors, but when it comes to TiVo, you never quite know which rumors will turn out to be true. As it turns out though, TiVo and Amazon actually have been in negotiations to bring Unbox to TiVo subscribers and they are almost ready to roll it out. It goes into testing on Wednesday, but initially it will only be in a few hundred homes. No word on whether they will offer streaming content or if it’s all download, but Amazon will need to use a different codec then Microsoft’s, in order for the files to play on a linux box. TiVo refused to give a timeline on a broader rollout, but it would certainly make a nice update for when they launch TiVoCast on the series 3 boxes. […]
[…] We heard early rumblings, but when it comes to TiVo, you never quite know which rumors will turn out to be true. As it turns out though, TiVo and Amazon actually have been in negotiations to bring Unbox to TiVo subscribers and they are almost ready to roll it out. It goes into testing on Wednesday, but initially it will only be in a few hundred homes. In order to use the service, customers will need to first purchase their movies directly from Amazon’s website. Though you can download the movie right to your desktop, you’ll need to download the film directly to the TiVo box. Amazon allows you to download 2 copies of any film at a time, but because of the system’s dependence on downloading, it means you’ll still have to wait to see your content. I would have preferred to have access to streaming content instead, especially given that it’s already connected to my TV set, but hopefully we’ll see something like that introduced further down the road. TiVo refused to give a timeline on the broader rollout, but it would certainly make a nice update, if they could enable it at the same time as when they launch TiVoCast for their series 3 boxes. […]