I missed the announcement of a partnership between Amazon and TiVo to deliver video directly from Amazon to (non-DirecTV) TiVo DVRs. I even missed the delivery of the service. Then I stumbled on it when I went to order a new product at Amazon: I can now buy or rent movies and TV shows to be delivered directly to my TiVo recorder. I order and pay on Amazon; the video shows up on TiVo the next time it checks in. All I had to do was enter my TiVo user name and password at Amazon. (The rental deal, by the way, isn’t all that good: 30 days to view, but only 24 hours to finish once you’ve started.)

The combination of buying some stuff for my television from iTunes Store (which I can watch on my TV on Apple TV) and buying other stuff for my television from Amazon (which I can watch on my TV on TiVo) seems like a huge deal. The combination means you can watch stuff on your television without ever having to depend on a cable, satellite or broadcast network. Neither library is complete or even particularly compelling, but the combination probably lets you (if you happen to own both a Series 2/3 TiVo and an Apple TV) get a pretty significant library of content — maybe even enough to skip having cable or satellite attached to your television.

That’s what is interesting. Imagine a world where you have an alternative to cable and satellite and even broadcast television! The Apple TV deal means that a computer company is negotiating for rights to distribute video content. And the Amazon/TiVo deal means an internet company is negotiating for rights to distribute video content. It’s a little like when Ted Turner first started distributing old movies on the TNT channel — it seemed barely relevant at the time, but it ended up being a revolution in TV distribution, particularly after he started CNN in 1980 (when it was referred to as the Chicken Noodle Network).

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 4:12 pm and is filed under Gadgets, Markets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.