Amazon and Tivo unveiled their joint downloadable video service today. The basic concept is you purchase video content on Amazon’s Unbox service and it automatically downloads onto your home Tivo, where it appears on your “Now Playing” list alongside shows you recorded yourself. It’s obviously yet another way to get downloaded content from the Internet to your TV and, in this case, bypassing your computer altogether (which especially good in my case since I mainly uses Macs and Amazon’s non-Tivo Unbox only works with Windows PCs). It’s essentially the same market Apple is going for with its Apple TV product.
Since I’m a big fan of both companies on their own, I gave it a whirl. There’s a pretty big selection of TV shows for purchase at the iTunes standard price of $1.99 per episode and a bunch of movies for sale and rent. Movie sale prices ($15 for recent releases and $10 for older flicks) look to be comparable, or worse than, DVDs, while rentals are $3.99. You have to watch the rented movie within 30 days and within 24 hours after you first start playing it. File sizes for movies are pretty large — almost 2 gigabytes for the recent Mike Judge movie Idiocracy, for example.
So I signed onto Amazon and easily linked to my Tivo account by entering my Tivo.com log-in info. I’d previously registered our broadband-connected Toshiba DVD-writing Tivo. Then it was a simple matter of picking a show or movie. I decided to try renting Idiocracy, since the price of buying movies was little better than buying a DVD and the thought of storing movies on my Tivo’s hard drive seemed just plain, well, idiotic. Amazon’s web site gave me an updated bar graph showing the progress of the movie downloading onto my Tivo:
Later, I sat down by the TV and sure enough, in a folder called Amazon Unbox, was the movie. It played just like any other show and looked fine on my standard-definition TV. So as far as convenience and ease of use, the Tivo-Unbox connection is pretty cool.
But, and it’s a big but, the big but of most downloadable video services, what’s the value proposition for me? I can go to the store and buy a DVD that will play anywhere for about the same price as Unbox and I can pretty easily rip that DVD to play on my iPod as well. Renting movies is cool but Comcast has major releases available on pay-per-view with older stuff on-demand for the same price. Maybe, maybe the Unbox selection of rental movies will get a lot bigger than Comcast’s selection (that old long-tail in action again) but not yet. Amazon shows under 500 movies for rent and about 900 to buy.
I do buy the occasional TV episode from iTunes for my iPod but that’s usually to because it’s for my iPod. Once in a blue moon, Tivo forgets to record something and we buy the episode from iTunes. I’d use Unbox for that now if it had the show. But that’s pretty rare. And my Tivo’s hard drive is far more limited than the hard drive on any of my computers. I’ve already offloaded some old TV episodes from my Mac and iPod to an external hard disk, something I couldn’t do from my Tivo. In fact, the Tivo space crunch seems to invalidate the whole idea of buying anything but rentals from Unbox. Oh well…some day my prince will come.
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