TiVo Unboxes Amazon’s Unbox
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).