(Credit:
Amazon)
TiVo DVR owners will soon be able to watch movies and TV shows purchased or rented from Amazon's Unbox video download service. The new feature, being beta tested by a "select group of TiVo subscribers" according to TiVo's press release, will eventually be rolled out to more than 1.5 million TiVo Series2 and Series3 owners.
According to the FAQ page on Amazon, you'll choose the videos you want to download while browsing Amazon's site on your PC, but the videos will be downloaded directly to the TiVo. Once they're fully downloaded, they'll appear in the Now Playing list with all the other recorded content on the DVR. To avoid hard-drive overcrowding, purchased videos can be erased from the TiVo and re-downloaded again at any time. And the download terminology is key here. The videos need to be fully (or at least partially) downloaded before they can be viewed, so you won't get the instant gratification of a YouTube-style streaming video. On the plus side, the quality should be good: when we reviewed Amazon Unbox on the PC, we noted the WMV9 video was "near DVD quality," and offered 5.1 surround sound. Ideally, the TiVo versions will be just as good, if not better.
While it's not completely comprehensive, Amazon's service offers content from some key Hollywood content providers, including Warner, Universal, Paramount, Fox, and CBS. The other good news is that the TiVo functionality won't cost extra: the same prices for PC downloads ($2 for TV show episodes, $10 to $15 for most movies, and $2 for movie rentals) will apply for watching the content on your TiVo. Unfortunately, there's no indication that Amazon will be offering a Netflix-style "all you can eat" subscription service anytime soon.
What about the fine print? Amazon Unbox on TiVo will work only on TiVo Series2 and Series3 boxes connected to a home network with broadband Internet access (naturally). Dial-up TiVo users and owners of DirecTV TiVo boxes are out of luck, as are (we assume) future subscribers to the TiVo service for cable. And don't expect to transfer the downloaded videos off your TiVo: they won't be compatible with TiVo's TiVoToGo or Multi-Room Viewing features (though you can download videos straight from Amazon to multiple PCs and some compatible portable-media devices). Moreover, while the Unbox service is for Windows only, we assume Amazon could open it to Mac users as well, at least for TiVo playback. On the flip side, owners of Windows Media Center PCs (or the Home Premium or Ultimate flavors of Windows Vista) will likely greet the TiVo announcement with a yawn: they already can stream downloaded Amazon Unbox videos from their PCs to their TVs, courtesy of the Xbox 360.
Caveats notwithstanding, Amazon Unbox for TiVo is a nice step-up feature for both products. Like other PC-based video download services (including CinemaNow, MovieLink, and the just-launched Wal-Mart store), the main criticism of Amazon's Unbox service was that you were stuck watching the movies on your PC rather than on your TV. Similarly, TiVo had long hinted that on-demand video content would eventually be available, but nothing ever materialized from a Netflix deal announced back in 2004. Likewise, the expensive Series3 box cuts off cable users' access to pay-per-view and video-on-demand content from the cable company (thanks to the limitations of the CableCARD technology upon which it relies). Amazon Unbox on Tivo is a tidy solution for all of these issues.
How well the Amazon/TiVo partnership will take on Apple TV (coming later in February) and Microsoft's Xbox 360 (which already offers HD movie and TV downloads for TV viewing without any PC intervention) is anyone's guess. But toss in additional competition from Netflix, CinemaNow, Google/YouTube, BitTorrent, and Sony--just to name a few--and one thing's for sure: the battle for on-demand digital content has the potential to make the Blu-ray/HD DVD competition look like a minor skirmish in a much larger war.
Additional sources: Gizmodo via Digg, New York Times via CNET
As part of the CES announcement of its promising EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD, Netgear announced a partnership with file-sharing upstart Bittorrent. Ashwin Navin, cofounder and CEO of Bittorrent, sat down with MarketWatch editor Bambi Francisco to discuss how the Netgear/Bittorrent combine hopes to battle Apple's forthcoming Apple TV. While the interview is short on technical details, Navin offers some interesting previews of where Bittorrent is headed. The company's new Online Marketplace will offer more than 10,000 titles from content partners including "3 major studios and about 25 indepedent and foreign studios," which Navin hopes will convert the service's existing user base of 135 million users into "legal and paying customers." Moreover, Navin implies that Bittorrent plans to partner with any and all hardware providers, holding out the possibility that Bittorrent-compatible will be more of an industry-wide standard rather than a closed proprietary option.
Sounds promising, but a lot remains left unsaid. Will Bittorrent offer content that's not available at the iTunes Store? How many of those 10,000 titles will be in high-def? Will they be copy-protected using Windows Media DRM? And how much will they cost? There are some things we can infer, however: with no hard drive built into the Netgear, the Bittorrent content--legal or illegal--will need to be downloaded to a networked PC before it's streamed to the Digital Entertainer HD in the living room. In other words, don't expect to click and stream. But thanks to the Netgear's compatibility with YouTube videos, at least you'll have some instant gratification available while you wait for the Bittorrent movie to download.
Netflix has fleshed out some details of its newly announced movie download service. The Watch Now instant viewing service is scheduled to become available to all Netflix subscribers by June. It will launch with just 1,000 titles (movies and TV shows), but the selection will expand thereafter--slowly but surely--to encompass as many of the 70,000-plus titles in the Netflix database as possible. The online viewing feature will be a free addition to existing accounts, with subscribers getting a monthly allotment of online viewing time based on their subscription level. For instance, an $18-per-month plan (three DVDs out at once) garners 18 hours of online viewing time per month.
Movies are delivered directly to a Web browser using a customized plug-in. Further, they're streamed in near real time, not played back after downloading, so the experience should be as close to instant gratification as possible (your broadband bandwidth permitting, of course). For now, the service appears to be limited to Internet Explorer running on a Windows PC (according to an article in the New York Times). Speaking on CNBC's Squawk Box this morning, CEO Reed Hastings described the online viewing feature as being "as easy as YouTube" and "as good-looking as a DVD." The latter half of that statement will be the hard part to pull off: the service's advertised 3-megabit-per-second limitation, while impressive, is less than a third of that offered by DVD--though better compression algorithms and codecs could help negate that. No word on whether audio will be limited to stereo playback or if a DVD-like surround track will be available.
Of course, even (or especially) if the picture is pristine, a lot of folks will prefer to watch the movie on their big-screen TV instead of a PC monitor. Work-arounds exist (many PCs offer a TV output), but it appears Netflix is working on viewing solutions that don't require a PC: "Over the coming years we'll expand our selection of films, and we'll work to get to every Internet-connected screen, from cell phones to PCs to plasma screens. The PC screen is the best Internet-connected screen today, so we are starting there," Hastings says in the press release.
One thing's for sure: given the host of IPTV announcements at last week's CES (as well as Apple TV at Macworld), it appears that 2007 could finally be the breakthrough year for digitally delivered media.
Note: The video walk-through of the Netflix Watch Now service is courtesy of HackingNetflix.com.
Apple iTV: coming soon
(Credit: appelinsider.com)By this time next week, Steve Jobs' Macworld Expo keynote address will be history. While guesses about what will be announced run the gamut from the mundane (OS X upgrades) to the lustful (iPod phone and/or wide-screen video iPod), it's a near certainty that we'll get more details on Apple's so-called iTV product. The iTV--its final name is still pending--is Apple's take on the digital media receiver. It's a small box designed to stream your computer-based iTunes media (movies, TV shows, music, podcasts) to your big-screen TV and home theater system--basically, a networked "home iPod." The little that's known about the iTV is what Jobs revealed back in September 2006: It's got built-in wireless networking, HDMI output, and--perhaps most importantly--it's priced at just $300.
But when will you be able to buy an iTV? And what features of the device does Apple have yet to reveal? Nobody knows for sure, but rumor site Appleinsider.com (as spotted on Digg) has some relevant dirt, thanks to "people familiar with the matter" (otherwise known as anonymous sources). The iTV will ship in just a few weeks ("late January or early February"). Moreover, it's said to have a "small hard drive" which would enable some local content storage, according to information previously leaked by Disney CEO Robert Iger (a friend and colleague of Jobs--the Apple CEO, you'll remember, also sits on Disney's board of directors as a result of the entertainment company's 2006 buyout of his other company, animation stalwart Pixar).
What do these latest rumors mean? Not too much, in the grand scheme of things. While Apple generally has its new products available within days of their announcements--if not instantaneously--anytime between now and the end of March would still fall within the previously announced first-quarter time frame. As for the inclusion of a small hard drive: maybe, maybe not. Yes, hard drives are dirt cheap these days, and Apple gets some of the best discounts in the business. But Iger's "hard drive" phrasing may be a layman's description of a decent flash memory capacity (say, 2GB to 4GB) that could be used to cache media files--especially video--as they zip across a home network, to deliver smoother performance. A few gigs also could be helpful when streaming Web radio and increasingly large digital photos.
Whatever the actual release date or storage capacity, however, there's no doubt that the iTV is going to shake up the market for digitally-delivered media. By this time next week, we'll have a much better idea of exactly how much. In the meantime, look for the rumors to reach a fever pitch.
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