Amazon & Tivo Take on Netflix

RadioTV writes "Amazon is in Beta testing with select Tivo users to allow Unbox videos to be downloaded to Series 2 and 3 set-top boxes. The FAQ for the service is available." The price point for movies is fairly reasonable. No HD and won't work with DirecTV's obsoleted HD tivo, but this is a step in the right direction.

Why isn't DirecTV up with the times?

Sorry, the service won't be available for DirecTV TiVo subscribers or TiVo subscribers who use a telephone phone line to access the service.

Well, that's one reason why the DirecTiVo subscribers won't be able to use it... Most DirecTiVo users aren't running hacked receivers that allow for the broadband connection. Why DirecTV keeps its users in the dark on the upgrades I'll never know. It's not like their own DVR is any good (in fact, I used a HD DVR this weekend at a friend's place and was completely unable to fast forward/rewind like I would expect it to work being a TiVo user).

This excites me

I can't be the only one who thinks this is a cool idea. If you look at the FAQ, you can even erase it from the Tivo and download it again when you want to watch it. Sounds like an offsite movie storage arrangement simply for the cost of Unbox movies.

And that they aren't going to lock it in to the tivo and let me transfer it to my PC? Golden. I love the idea of hearing about a cool flick at work, logging in and buying it, and then coming home to it sitting there and just waiting for me to watch it.

Re:This excites me

I can't be the only one who thinks this is a cool idea. If you look at the FAQ, you can even erase it from the Tivo and download it again when you want to watch it. Sounds like an offsite movie storage arrangement simply for the cost of Unbox movies.

It's not as cool as what Netflix is already doing, which is letting you stream movies basically for "free" if you're already a subscriber. You get an hour's worth of streaming for every dollar you spend with them per month. And you can watch the same movie over and over if you want to. The quality is also better than Unbox (if you've got a good net connection - it automatically selects your quality level.)

You also really only get charged for the time you use... if you select a 2 hour movie and watch 5 minutes before deciding it sucks, you only get charged for 5 minutes, not the whole movie. Big difference from Unbox. And you can start watching immediately, you don't need to wait for a download.

You can argue about TiVo being hooked up to a person's TV vs. streaming over a computer, but TiVo doesn't exactly have a huge market share; I'd wager at least as many people have their PC's hooked up to a TV as have TiVo. And with people watching more video on their computers anyway, I'm not sure the distinction is really going to matter in a few years. A monitor will be a monitor.

Re:This excites me

I'd wager at least as many people have their PC's hooked up to a TV as have TiVo.

Really??? If you're willing to wager I think a lot of people would take you up on it. I'm a geek and I've only hooked up a computer to my television once. Given this was about four years ago, but it looked crappy even with an S-Video cable and I got sick of having a wireless keyboard and mouse on the coffee table. I won't be doing it again soon if I can avoid it. I'd be surprised if there weren't 20 or more TiVo's plugged into televisions for every computer out there that is.

Oh, and I love my TiVo and my modded XBox with XBox Media Center.

Price Point

The price point for movies is fairly reasonable.

Says who?

A random new release [amazon.com] is $14.99, the same price I would pay to own the movie, not rent a copy

The service seems to be on par with the iTunes prices for TV shows an has the advantage of going right to your TiVo.

Re:Price Point

From the press release [tivo.com]:

Customers can purchase television episodes for $1.99, purchase most movies for between $9.99 and $14.99, or rent movies starting at $1.99.
(Emphasis added)

TiVo/Unbox solves two major digital movie distribution problems: displaying on television and dealing with the lack of backups. If the price-point for rentals stays in the $2 range (the supermarket where I rent from is usually $1 or $1.50), then you've actually got something that might actually work for the average family.

Re:Price Point

You mean paying more for something that will take longer to download than going to the rental store?

It is pretty well accepted that people will pay for extra convenience. $0.50 more for a movie that you can download to your Tivo is more convenient than having to go to your local rental store.

And it is probably even cheaper if you add in the transportation costs that it would take to go to the rental store. At 25mpg @ $2.50/gallon and $0.05 per mile for repair costs, that is $0.15 per mile. If the rental store is even 1.7 miles out of your way, it is cheaper to download the movie.

--

Re:Price Point

Read this [boingboing.net] then decide if it's worth it. Besides, why should I pay $15 for a movie that I can buy at WalMart for the same price? Besides, if you read, you don't actually own the movie.

Section 3a: "The Software automatically checks for upgrades, but the Software will not automatically upgrade without your consent, except as provided herein. If you do not consent to an upgrade that we make subject to your consent, the Digital Content may no longer be viewed on your Authorized Device. You must keep the Software on your Authorized Device current in order to continue to use the Service. We may automatically upgrade the Software when we believe such upgrade is appropriate to comply with law, enforce this Agreement, or protect the rights, safety or property of Amazon, our content providers, users, or others."

Section 3c. Removal of Software. If you uninstall or otherwise remove the Software, your ability to view all Digital Content you have downloaded to the Authorized Device will immediately and automatically terminate and we reserve the right to delete all Digital Content from that Authorized Device without notice to you.

I can watch DVD's whenever and am not subject to the wierdness in Unbox's EULA.

Re:Price Point

Remember, it's rentals starting at $1.99.

If you look at the actual 1018 movies available to rent on their site, and sort by price, you'll see only the bottom ~10% (110 movies) are available at $1.99.
Then 208 movies are available at $2.99.
And the remaining 700 movies, the vast majority of their collection, including anything most people would be interested in watching, are $3.99 to rent (more than double the advertised starting price).

I've said before that I would only be interested in online rentals if they can get within spitting distance of the $1.xx per disc I pay at Blockbuster Online or Netflix. $1.99 for everything would just barely meet that qualification, $1.99 for a few token b-movies (or c- or d-movies), and twice that for everything else does not qualify.

(Of course, I have neither a Windows box, nor a Tivo, so the service would be useless to me anyway. I wonder if/when companies are finally going to realize that a disproportionate number of early adopters are mac users...)

This is the future

The current model is: The TV networks produce/buy content. They pad it with advertisements. They get money from the advertisers paying for the whole project. They broadcast these content 24/7/365. Most people get between a few dozen to a few hundred of these channels. They pay nothing other than their eye-ball time. [The cable/sat fees are paid to the delivery infrastructure, not to the content producers or TV networks.]

This model is dead. The networks have to add ads that the customers dont want and make sure it is not too onerous. With the advent of PVR, ad skipping is here to stay. If ad-skipping is prevented by technology or law people would stop watching the shows. They wont accept ads anymore. Once the revenue stream is gone or severely reduced, the TV networks can not produce interesting and exciting content.

So the new model is going to be to use the internet to pump the shows people want to watch in their hard disks at home connected to TV. They will pay for content. They have to. They cant sneak ad in again like they did in cable tv because, no advertiser is going to pay for ads that people are going to skip anyway. I like this new model. Due to economy of scale and cutting out the fat in TV networks and ad management etc, I expect a service that will give me "Jeopardy, Tonight Show, Daily Show, This Week with George Stephenopolis, Shoot out, Dog fights, Myth busters, NOVA, BBC news, and a few History channel, Discovery Channel and national geographic shows" for about 10 or 20 $ a month. Great! Even my 740Kbps service has enough bandwidth to download all these with plenty left over for my vpn connection to work. I hope it succeeds. I think it will succeed.

Digital Delivery = Dozens of Players

YouTube, Amazon, NetFlix, Xbox Live, Sony, Apple, Cable companies, Sattelite companies ....

There are no shortage of players eyeballing paid digital delivery.

Internet access plus TV-connected hardware is hardly a rare or difficult-to-repeat formula.

These margins are going to get razor thin... And the "capture apps" that permanently save this
stuff haven't even *begun* to beome widespread yet.

All these $3 short term digital "rentals" are going to look a whole lot like purchases before
the studios even know what hit 'em.

The DirecTiVo is not "obsoleted"

The DirecTV TiVoes, including the HD DirecTV TiVo are not obsolete by any stretch. You just can't get the latest TiVo features (you haven't been able to do that for 5 years), and you can't buy a new one from DirecTV any more. But there's a thriving secondary market, and it still works great. I'll take my "obsoleted" HD DirecTV TiVo over any DVR out there that doesn't run the TiVo software. Dual tuner, HD, reasonably upgradeable to a 750GB hard drive, Season Passes, 30 second skip, etc. If that's obsolete, what do you make of theat P.O.S. Scientific American or Motorola DVR you have hooked up to your TV-- obsoleteded?

I wish DirecTV had stuck with TiVo, but just because they didn't doesn't make the years-ahread-of-it's-time DirecTV TiVo (dual tuners back in 2001!) obsolete by any stretch.

Series 3? Yeah!

I've got to say, I've got a Series 3 and I love it. That said, it's great that they are doing this on Series 3 as well as the Series 2 machines. It's no secret (if you follow TiVos) that some of the Series 2 features (like multi-room-viewing) aren't available on the Series 3 (stupid Cable Labs). Series 3 is also a little behind of some features (Series 2 has folders/recently deleted and such, Series 3 doesn't yet but they showed it at CES). It's nice to see a feature available for both.

I'm a little disappointed at the lack of HD content, but I completely understand why.

I wish I got to test this. I'd love to.

I especially like that once you've purchased something you can download it again for free. It would be untenable if you couldn't.

they are competing with iTunes, not Netflix

Tivo has to make some kind of partnership to survive -- it simply doesn't make sense otherwise.

I bought a used series 2 TIVO for $50, but they were charging $20 / mo. and I had to sign up for a year's contract to get any service.

Comcast only charges me $11.95 / mo. for their DVR and I can run it month to month so I can ditch it when something more mature and cheaper comes to the market. Tivo just seem like jerks compared to that, but it's because they are so desperate they have to act like a cell-phone company. Even if you give someone a gift certificate, it only counts *towards* them signing up for a 1-year contract.

I laughed when I saw Apple's iTV offering, but then I heard Disney had already sold over $1 Million worth of downloaded movies over iTunes. Then I started thinking about what could happen if I let go of the cable TV (at $60 / month) and just ordered the shows I want over iTunes -- the only show I care about is the Daily Show, and anything else I watch is really just a distraction from my life.

The good thing about this is that it shows that the market is moving to an iTunes distribution model, and that kind of competition will only help everyone. iTunes is the competition space here though, not Netflix

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Amazon's EULA == DRM NIghtmare

Here's the link to a plain-english read on it by the chicago tribune: http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ez orn/2006/09/scary_movie_dow.html [chicagotribune.com]

Here's an explitive laced though pretty good summary: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/15/amazon_unbox_ to_cust.html [boingboing.net]

Here's the EULA: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.htm l/ref=atv_dp_cs_use/002-8388024-7705601?ie=UTF8&no deId=200026970 [amazon.com]

From the bottom of my heart, I thank all unbox consumers for abaondoning the decades of time and people's effort to create and guard the principal that I own my media.

Pay, pay, and pay again...

So, the people who would use this, already pay to watch bad TV and advertisements (cable TV), they pay for a Tivo to cut out the advertisements they pay for every month with their cable bill, and now they're going to pay to download content? I don't understand some people. But you know what "they" say about a fool and his money...

Mandatory

No HD and won't work with DirecTV's obsoleted HD tivo
Sounds lame.

The TV is dead ... long live TV!

This is probably not the revolution right here, but it could be the sign that the wave is cresting and ready to break. One day all flat screen HD tvs will have an rj45 jack (or maybe builtin wireless) they'll connect to the central servers and peer-to-peer share every tv show and film you could possibly want to watch, whenever you want to watch it. no more messing with recordable media to time shift the broadcasters dictated overlapping randomised scheduling, especially considering the buy-once-download-again-any-time model :-)

Thanks, TiVo, for nothing.

TiVo needs to fix the problems affecting many older Series2 users [slashdot.org] before they do anything else..

Widescreen?

I know they say it won't be HD, and that's okay; but will the movies be widescreen? That's what would make or break this for me.

I'm perfectly happy watching a movie in 480p.

Tivo transfer rate too slow

I have Tivo, I love it, but things like TivoToGo is ridiculously slow when it comes to transferring to and from PCs. I think it was something like 300 kilobits (not bytes) per second. And I am using a network cable connection, not going over wireless. If it's going to take me 3-4 hrs to download a movie, I don't know if that's something that I'd be too interested in. I don't know what they need to do to increase the bandwidth of the network layer on a Tivo but surely that's something that can be improved... right now I would rather drive out to a Blockbuster and rent the movie since that would take less time than downloading a movie.

Forget Amazon's Unbox ...

... if you use a Mac or a Linux box. Only Windows PCs are supported. See the Unbox FAQ [amazon.com]. I'm constantly amazed that vendors turn their noses up at millions of potential customers that happen to use other OSs. Amazon, at least, should know better.

Still a 24 hour deadline?

The price point for movies is fairly reasonable.

But the FAQ doesn't mention whether or not there is still a 24 hour deadline for finishing the movie/program after you start it. That is my single biggest problem with all the download services. There have been many, many times when I got half way through a movie and was too tired to finish it that night, so I had to wait two or three nights until I had time. I will not use ANY of the download services until this restriction is relaxed. How about thirty days? I think that's reasonable.

Re:Seems a little ridiculous...

I think it's more for when you join a series part-way through and want to download it to watch the first few eps, or for downloading older shows that aren't currently being aired (or are being repeated at random).

These reasons, along with the convenience of not having to have a tivo and bypassing your country's year+ delay in showing new shows are why most people download torrents of tv shows.

Re:Seems a little ridiculous...

Well, if you decide on the spur of the moment decide what to watch you have to wait for an hour. But your viewing habits are predictable, atleast by you. And you are still tied to thinking, "I got to watch it when they show it". No, just start the download, if you have not already programmed the download queue weeks or months earlier. Do some other chores around the house, and you watch it when it is convenient to you. I like to watch Jeopardy at 8:30. I dont mind watching the previous day's Daily Show at 8PM next day. There is nothing in NOVA that will go stale in three hours or three weeks. Welcome to the brave new world pal. You are in charge of what you watch, when you watch. Once you taste this freedom, there is no going back to "500 channels and there is nothing worth watching" era. Even whats worth watching gets constantly interrupted by people who are singing about a sausage on a stick with a pancake wrapped around it or talk about the new and exciting products made by "Depends".

Re:Seems a little ridiculous...

I don't know about you but I personally would not want to have to wait an hour to download a TV show. It seems like if you were that interested in the show you could simply record it when the episode first airs...

As a TiVo owner, I'm used to flagging a show to record days in advance. I'm usually in no great hurry to watch that particular show, because I have hours of my favorite shows already stored on my TiVo. Eventually, it shows up on the menu. I would of course record a show when it comes on, and save the 2 bucks...unless of course I didn't get interested in the show until mid season, or even 2nd season, or the TiVo missed it because of a sporting event or news interruption.

Unavailability of shows in HD is a significant negative. The XBox360 will download many shows in HD, although the list of available shows (for any quality) is very limited. But are we sure that they won't have HD? The FAQ just says "better than series 2 best quality." For that matter, for a lot of shows I'd be satisfied with DVD quality...wide-screen 480p.