TiVo Will Stream Content From The Web

Patik writes "According to an article at the NY Times, 'new TiVo technology... will allow users to download movies and music from the Internet to the hard drive on their video recorder.' This is TiVo's next big push for subscribers after being dumped by DirecTV Tuesday. Blockbuster, Netflix, and Real are also looking into distributing feature-length movies over the web."

Comments

TOS?

[shadowkoder]

What will the terms of service be? Same rules as using this over satellite, or is the **AA going to have a fit over this (though I think we may already know that answer)?

I can do all this now

[barcodez]

Seriously I can do all this stuff now. These companies are so far behind the curve technologically one would be forgiven for thinking they don't deserve to make any money out of this. I'm struggling to see where they are adding value to the consumer.

Distributed, etc.

[Ieshan]

It would be a very interesting business model to employ something similar to Bit-Torrent for their distribution system. I immediately thought of the same problem, until I realized the incredible transfer rates you'd achieve with thousands of customers using an automated distributed content system.

A caveat would be that they'd have to have a large number of servers to handle the load of "esoteric" titles - that is, movies that only a very few people will download at any given time. Also, the distribution would be much faster for popular movies - Bit-Torrent relies on swarming and things.

But it'd be really interesting to see this kind of an implementation, even if they did rewrite the original.

Re:Bandwidth?

[xiando]

Bandwidth doesn't need to be a problem. In my country the major TV channels make deals with local IPs to mirror their shows, when you download the latest episode of some show you get it directly from your ISPs mirror. This would require alot more deals to be made in big countries like the US, but it's quite possible. I still don't use this service, though, because these services are for WMP only and I'm not switching to windows to be able to pay for content I can get form other sources anyway. My ISP also have a "rental service" for movies that uses a java applet player that doesn't work very well in Linux (and doesn't let you save the file to your harddrive)