The Downloadable Video war of the late 2000s will no doubt be remembered as among our darkest hours. With retail heavyweight Wal-Mart massing its forces, online dominator Amazon had no option but to retaliate by establishing a living room beachhead with the help of a key entente.
It’d been long rumored that the DVR empire of TiVo was itching to enter the downloadable video fray, but much of the noise had revolved around them striking an alliance with fellow “video on demand” force Netflix. Not so, it was revealed today. TiVo will instead viciously betray Netflix by enabling the downloading of video from Amazon’s Unbox service onto broadband-connected Series 2 and Series 3 units. Videos will supposedly be “better quality than videos recorded at the Best Quality setting on a TiVo Series2 DVR” and their licensing will allow you to have a movie on two PCs or TiVos and two portable devices at a time, though TiVoToGo and Multi-Room features are disabled.
Due to the limitations of bandwidth the “instant” part of “instant gratification” still seems to be MIA. According to their FAQ, downloading a movie on a 5 Mbps connection will take “about an hour…However, on a slower broadband connection (less than 1 Mbps), a movie could take up to 5 hours.” They’re combating this problem with the Unbox RemoteLoad feature:
…the Unbox RemoteLoad feature allows you to order from Amazon.com and download anywhere. So, you can order your video during your lunch break and itll be ready to watch when you get home from work.Anyone else see that totally skyrocketing sales of Office Space?
[via Slashdot]
Now, this would satisfy an itch of mine: I can't watch video from iTMS on my TiVo. Therefore, I'm more likely to get that episode of Grey's that our TiVo missed, um, elsewhere *cough* torrent *cough*. I'd much rather just buy the damn thing and know I have a good version. I know, Uncle Steve would rather I buy an AppleTV, but I already have a networked box in my entertainment center. It remains to be seen if the AppleTV experience is sufficiently good to make me abandon TiVo.
No TiVoToGo for Unbox video? Boo. Not a dealbreaker, but boo. Get over the anti-piracy already and let me have my way with the video I *bought*.
Can you buy movies on a Mac and download them to a TiVo? If the store is Windows only, then that remains a deal breaker.
This really only works for rentals. I don't know anyone that uses their TiVo for long-term storage. What do I do with movies I buy on Amazon and download to my TiVo? I can't keep them on my TiVo forever (drives do fail).