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Tivo and Netflix Partner For DVDs on Demand
Tonetheman writes "The details are not really there yet, but it looks like Tivo and Netflix are going to team up! This is great for those who watch a lot of DVD's. You will be able to order a DVD and have it appear sometime later on the Tivo. Blockbuster will not be far behind with your favorite cable company."
...hacked in 5...4..3...2..1...
sounds great. Now to figure out how to hack the tivo so you can burn the movies to dvd
I like the sound of it. One of my biggest complaints about Netflix was that you couldn't just say "Oh man, I really want to see !" and go get it to watch that night. Admittedly, their shipping service is fast, but it's still not the same when you have to wait a day or two to get it. But if I could download it (or at least get it streaming) instantly or within a couple of hours, that'd be pretty darn cool :)
Thankfully, they will continue to implement their rip-offs in such a fashion that the service will be too difficult for Average Joe, sub-mediocre, and still not satisfy anybody's needs.
:)
My name is Ryan, and I'm a Netflix fan. Still need to get on the Tivo bandwagon, though.
"All your base are belong to this file I send in order to have your advice."
1. Get a DVD burner.
2. Download DVD Shrink
3. Sign up for Blockbuster's Movie Pass (Unlimited Rentals, 2 out at a time).
4. Purchase blank DVD+R's and jewel cases.
5. Print covers from cdcovers.cc.
6. Go crazy.
So far I've increased my collection by 52 movies in the last month, at about 90 cents each (DVD+R + jewel case + prorated Movie Pass)
That way I can take a copy if I like it.
Where do they plan on finding super-high bandwidth connections for home users? For me at least, it is and would remain much faster to to spend five minutes walking the two blocks to the video rental shop and just get one there, rather than waiting a couple hours for the movie to download.
"...Blockbuster will not be far behind with your favorite cable company."
Comcast already offers movies through their OnDemand service and I don't have to wait for them to download before I watch them. The service unblocks access to the movie I want for 24 hours so I can watch it anytime I want before the time's up.
Strangeberry software, codeveloped by one of the writers of Sun's Java programming language, allows users to plug a DSL or cable modem into the back of the TiVo device and draw digital content like music and movies off the Internet.
TiVo can already use your broadband connection to download their programming info. Does anyone know exactly what Strangeberry does? The TiVo press release just described it as "protocols and tools for delivery of broadband."
I'm also wondering if this is going to be an update to your existing TiVo software, or if it'll be another $100 add-on, like Home Media Option.
-bhj
or, you could switch to directv, and get the box for $40 and tivo service for $4 a month. at least here you could.
Hey, fix the damn al a carte system first! I don't want to order my cable with the existing packages, but would rather only pay for the channels (and services) I prefer. No damned shopping channels and such, just give me news channels, History channel, TLC, Discovery, BBC, Speedvision, ESPN, TCM and broadband cable, with the OPTION of being able to order specific movies or events ON DEMAND when I want them.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
As an avid Netflix subscriber and recent TiVo purchaser, this sounds great. Being able to add a movie to my queue and then watch it within hours, as opposed to ~2 days would be quite cool.
Of course I haven't R'dTFA, but I wonder what the disk space requirements are for this? The 40 hour units don't exactly have a ton of space.
I also wonder how the MPAA is going to agree to this; it's already fairly trivial to telnet or FTP to a TiVo, pull the programs off, and burn them to a DVD (or so I hear). You'd think that this thing will be h4xx0r3d pretty quick.
It's "no one," not "noone." Who the hell is noone anyway?
On it's last leg but it continues to try to find new ways to innovate while your cable company and satellite company continue to rip off their ideas? Maybe so but who's coming up with the good ideas and implementing them in such a way that it just works? Tivo created the DVR, you can bet they've got a few ideas up their sleaves yet... i for one will buy a tivo and a netflix account if this hits :)
My problem with directv was that you needed a phoneline to use their boxes, blah on that, tivo let's me use broadband which i don't mind running cat5 to my tv, but why should i run a flipping phoneline to my tv? doesn't make sense. comcast might have a similar option but ya know... i can't even get it in my area yet, or if i can i have to have the bastards bring out another box, who knows how long that'll take, they still haven't come and picked up their crappy cable modem that died on me that has been in it's box for a good year now.
I welcome this kind of service.. now hopefully it's cheaper for netflix to do this over the net than it is to send it in the mail and i don't have to pay $20/mo for this type of service.. which i think is kinda high for my own personal viewing habits.
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
I wonder if they are going to get in trouble, or if they have permission for such a plan. I could see them saying each TiVo copy is linked to a physical DVD - but MP3.com tried that long ago to disasterous effect by letting you listen to streamed music of a CD that you identified you owned.
It sounds great though and would be the thing that would finally have me buy a TiVo box. Plus, if you think about it, it could almost make the HDVD spec moot if you could download HD media to your TIVO from Netflix (perhaps in conjuction with HDNet as per the recent story, though they want to ship out physical drives to customers!).
Sounds like a great idea to keep both Netflix and TiVo ahead of rivals.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is an excellent move. I've got a netflix subscription, and I want to get a tivo. The idea of being able to get DVDs on demand over my Tivo (and watch x many times or y hours) is sweet. The only issue is bandwidth. I've got a 3mbit/s connection, and it would be nice to watch it in real time (a well compressed 3mbit/s strem can look nice - DirecTV's channels are a little less than 3mbit/s by comparison). Still, its wonderful to hear this.
About damn time.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
dude this is huge!
I've heard that so many times it's lost all meaning.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
In other news, so have Suprnova and my DVD burner.
Because without Tivo your cable company is going to go back to doing what it always does. Never innovate and always raise prices. It took Tivo to get them off of their butts and finally implement DVR. You still can't stream MP3s or anything else to your cable box (which is handy when your stereo is attached to your TV). I don't know about your area, but in mine the "video on demand" service is a joke, there are like 50 movies on it and they're all summer movie crap, and they're fairly expensive to rent. If the Tivo/Netflix partnership goes well, that service could be greatly improved (and reduced in price) while your local monopoly tries their hardest to squash their competition.
I read the internet for the articles.
congrats on frist psot!
To me it seems like blockbuster and netflix and the like are probably feeling the squeeze from all this tivo/dvr/video-on-demand and need to partner w/ these companies that get into the home each and every day.
When I worked with my local cable provider in tech support for the highspeed clients the cable provider was beta testing the inDemand features in new cable boxes. The employees who wanted to help were the beta testers. I enjoyed the sneak peek at the near future, but on to my main point...
One day i was helping the guy who was deploying the inDemand systems and I was asking him about the technical details and scaling the systems. At the end of the conversation he put it this way:
"They're basically gunning to put blockbuster out of business.."
that's not the exact quote but close... and of course it was only his opinion, but who knows... blockbuster will soon be at the knees of these cable companies with on-demand movies because they can get it to the home.
mod me down if u must
------ no thanks... I've quit
try to find new ways to innovate while your cable company and satellite company continue to rip off their ideas
This is Slashdot. You are not allowed to compete based on innovation, as that requires some sort of notion of intellectual property and patent protection, lest the good ideas simply be copied by others that compete on other grounds.
However, I don't see how TiVo is going to continue to compete with actual content providers. The Time Warner box in question (Scientific Atlanta 8000HD) can handle HDTV, something the cheap-ass $100 TiVo cannot. So now we're talking about a relatively expensive initial investment for the TiVo hardware.
I'm a hardware nerd, and totally happy to hack a TiVo to 320GB, but most people aren't. Remember that.
As for the $300 package, $300 would buy me five years worth of TWC DVR service. I find it highly unlikely anyone will *really* be using that 5 year old modded TiVo at that point. Maybe some people would, but I'm usually much faster on the electronics upgrade cycle than that.
As far as I can tell, the TiVo's widely-celebrated interface is the only advantage it has, and I'm afraid people aren't going to want to pay what is suddenly a VERY large price difference just for that. Especially people who have never USED both interfaces.
I would MUCH rather see a company like TiVo succeed, instead of Time Warner. But I have to admit TWC is getting my $5/mo, and Tivo isn't getting a dime. :(
HO
Or only the movie?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Agreed about VOD, but in my area TWC has just introduced actual DVR boxes. Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000HD.
I haven't used it yet, but mine's on its way. I stream mp3's with digital audio cable directly from my computer, so extra features like that, though cool, aren't necessary for me. I'm also afraid they're meaningless to the general populace.
HO
For the following reasons:
Don't try to search for an upcoming show by name -- you'll have to hit TVGuide.com for that -- definitely not an integrated experience!
You also won't be seeing any "TiVo suggestions", based on which shows you've given the "thumbs up" to.
You won't be able to modify that cable box, either. TiVo is Linux based, and a LOT of hacks exist, so that you can do more with your equipment. That cable box is NOT your equipment, so just sit back and relax, and hope that you don't ever want to do anything with all that content but watch it on your TV later.
You're missing out on a bit of functionality there -- but go ahead and enjoy your less expensive solution... while I enjoy knowing that what mine is mine, and not rented.
Oh yeah, I only pay $6.95 a month for TiVo service. Just call them up and threaten to leave -- they are more than willing to negotiate. You definitely can't say that for your cable company!
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
So how are they going to do this? Are they really going to deliver you the 6GB DVD stream of "Signs" or "Moulin Rouge?" I can see networks of DSLams from coast to coast grinding to a halt now. More likely it will be some shit quality rip made by machines in a "ripping factory" - if you have broadband you could ALREADY get anything they have to offer from usenet or bittorrent, in higher quality than they are likely to offer, and get it before these folks get around to "licensing" the content for broadcast from ho-town.
Jack had it wrong all along, and it's sad to see how his antiquated notions have crippled the potential of an entire industry. So long as Hollywood continues to deny broadcasters the ability to compete by offering high quality and convenience in one package, "piracy" is going to grow in the mainstream.
It's not about competing with free, Jack - it's about competing with quality.
This sounds great (I have both a Tivo and Netflix subscription) but I'm worried about the sound quality coming out of the Tivo. Right now, the Tivo doesn't support multi-channel output so I think the best movies via the Tivo could do would be Stereo sounds. :( Is this the case?
- Broadband is presumably required
to download the DVD content
- This will likely be broadband over cable in most areas
- My provider, Comcast, offers a competing on-demand service
- Comcast is known to terminate service
for anyone who actually uses their unlimited broadband
- Sign up, start downloading
... then go begging to get your Internet restored?
I suspect that other large cable/broadband providers will do the same (terminate, interrupt, or otherwise impede service), perhaps regardless of whether they provide on-demand services that directly compete with this Tivo/Netflicks offering.Howard M. Lewis Ship -- Independent J2EE / Open-Source Java Consultant -- Creator, Apache Tapestry and HiveMind
with this one you don't have to wait, it's instant...
only thing is I believe there's only a limited selection but i'm not sure...
https://secure.shaw.ca/sod/home.asp/
The movie should immediately start playing on your TV. Sit back and enjoy the show! Remember that you can stop, pause, rewind or jump forward at any time using your remote control.
-judging another only defines yourself
If Tivo had an HD box that worked on TW I'd by it today, happily. I have Time Warner's Scientific Atlanta 8000HD box. It's a HD DVR. It's ok for the most part but the interface is way, way behind TiVo. No suggestions. I see every channel in the guide, not just what I subscribe to. It will record the same 40 episodes of South Park and fill up the drive if I don't watch it instead of recording each episode once. Doing a lookup (by name or whatever) is a bitch compared to TiVo.
TiVo, please come take my money again!
The Matrix clocks in at 7.8GB.
At 1 Mb/s, that's close to a day.
Or by "DVD", maybe they mean a low quality copy of the movie you might rent on DVD, with none of the extras, bells or whistles.
Tivo will survive because it has a loyal fan base who love the unit, who can hack the unit to expand it, and now because of netflix.
Look at it this way. How many of slashdot's readers have netflix? I don't but if this were offered i'd get a subscription if it was "unlimited" still. It's really that simple. Your cable company as mentioned does not offer a very wide selection of movies and they're much more expensive. Tivo is going to have one hell of a service if they can provide this.
Tivo will likely remain a niche market device, while people who just kind of like the idea of DVR's and don't want all the fun little nifty things tivo does will pay the $5/mo for the mediocre service their cable/sat company provides them. Tivo's niche market is fairly large so i am pretty sure it'll sustain itself just fine, and once netflix customers start seeing they can get movies on demand from a tivo device you can bet that they'll be interested! This works both ways.
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
What's the difference between a network cable going to your TV and a phone cable going to your TV? I would assume that most people would have a phone (and therefore a phone line) in the same room as their TV but far fewer people would have a computer\router\switch etc. Mabey I'm missing the point, but that alone seems like a strange reason to choose one over the other, especially if the other costs substantially less.
--Do Not Write In This Space--
You don't really need a phoneline. I haven't had my phoneline plugged in for over 190 days (it gives you a message about it) on any of my DirecTiVo boxes (4 of em).
Nice to know, so i guess once the big tree that's in direct line of the satellite is gone we might be able to get directv ;)
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
DirectTV's box needs a phone line not for TV listings like TV, it uses the phone line to dial in to report pay-per-view purchases. Without a phone line you can pretty much rack up PPV purchases and never pay for them but most of the boxes I've owned put a stop to it after like 25 or so.
I have a computer, an xbox, a ps2 and maybe a tivo sometime in the future near my tv. All of those like having ethernet, especially the computer since I can stream from one computer in the house to the other.
The phone wire? well.. there's no phone wires in my house. In my parent's house we had phone jacks in three rooms.. kitchen, master bedroom and yes, the room with the tv.. but it was in a stupid spot. We were running cat5 already, easier to run that and infinitely more versatile. If I really needed it to be something special, then I'm sure there's adapters somewhere that'll only make use of 4 of the wires, so I could use the existing cable to do phone stuff. *shrug* never needed to even consider that before.
This idea is long overdue as far as I'm concerned. Given the delivery method of most cable services now, there's no reason for it not to happen. Well, I take that back: The reason is, if people are allowed to do this, the cable companies would make less money. So that's probably why it hasn't happened yet. But I live in New York and deal with Time-Warner Cable, paying $50/month for expanded basic service, which gives me some 60-70 channels, of which I regularly watch maybe 15. Hopefully the cable companies will come around to this way of thinking eventually, but I'm not sure I'm holding my breath.
--Matthew
"If the lights of Broadway blind me, I won't mind..."
I hate TiVo for their warped business model of charging extortive prices for a few kb of data a month. It's just insult to injury that they sell my viewing habits to the highest bidder after I pay them for the service that allows them to collect the data.
I have been a very happy netflix customer for a long time and I'm on one of the larger plans. If they go throught with this, I'll cancel my account, and I just emailed them to tell them that.
My favorite cable company? Hell, I've only got one choice and it's a bit of a stretch to call it my favorite...
TiVo's OS is Linux based, you can download the source code: http://tivo.com/linux/linux.asp
I'm not sure about all TiVo's but mine has a USB port in the back (and most of the new ones do) but there are several books and online guides (one book that i know of "Hacking the TiVo")
But you can pull the MPEG2's right off the TiVo and on to your hard drive, and then it's onto the DVD burner from there.
However, I don't know if this NetFlix thing is actually going to send the entire DVD to your TiVo (with the menus and deleted scenes and stuff) or if it's just going to be movies only.
I have DirecTV and TiVo, and they already have "Starz on demand" where you choose what movie you want.
If you order pay per view, or record something on Starz, you can record it onto a DVD, but it might not have the deleted scenes and stuff.
Also with a TiVo, there is something called the "showcase" and if you go into the "showcase" menu it has a few short video clips, (all junk like commercials and stuff)
But I'm not sure if this is real big news, there have been all kinds of movie services in the past. (Pay-Per-View, Starz, HBO, ShowTime, On-Demand) (KaZaA)
But if this new service is going to send the entire DVD, (deleted scenes and all), it will be pretty cool.
This is the cable company you're speaking of. One disgruntled employee call to the MPAA "Hey...Guess what Cox does!"
They're not about to risk their corporate and personal futures for the sake of pissing off the MPAA trying to shave the licensing costs.
That's all well and good, but not everyone has a 700KB/sec download speed. Most people have at max 300KB and a lot of people have crapola speeds of 120KB or less (!). This causes a serious headache when I can get a 1 CD xvid rip done in an hour, or a 2cd xvid rip done in two or so.
IntechHosting - Free domain, 2GB, PHP, £4.95/$8.95
This is what cable companies are doing with VOD (video on demand). I Have have had this service (no extra cost) for a good 1 1/2 - 2 years with TimeWarner/Brighthouse. I just turn to channel 1 and can scroll through the movies available. The cost per movie is about the same as Blockbuster. I hit play and the movie starts right away. I can stop/rewind/FF/Play as much as I want for 24 hours. The only thing that currently sucks about the service is the poor movie selection. Maybe 100-150 movies. Now, if the cable companies had a big library, the service would be great and I would have no need to go to Blockbuster or the local movie joint.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Until the whole system gets hacked and you come home to 37 hours of gay midget porn all conveniently already billed to your account. =)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
You will be able to order a DVD and have it appear sometime later on the Tivo.
I already enjoy this slow pseudo-VOD service with TV shows (and whatever DVDs people have stored on their RTVs) using ReplayTV and Poopli. It's like Napster for video.
Da Blog
You've ordered a braindead DVR that is essentially nothing more than a hard disk based replacement for your VCR. Completely unintelligent, without TiVo's ability to seamlessly capture all your favorite shows without your having to worry about time or channel changes.
It's a lot more than a "widely celebrated interface". It's the ability to finally stop having to manage yet another damned box and just enjoy your TV programming. These brain-dead cable DVRs don't do that. They aren't anything like a TiVo at all.
Tivo created the DVR
Actually both ReplayTV and Tivo brought their technology to market simultaneously (summer of 1999)O. So much so, in fact, that they dropped competing patent infringement lawsuits against each other in favour of a blanket patent sharing arrangement.
If you are not familiar with ReplayTV vs Tivo, there's a simple analogy. Think: Apple vs Microsoft. The market shares are actually kind of similar as well.
Da Blog
I just came from www.tivocommunity.com where they have a specific forum for TiVo hacking. Video extraction is anything but trivial.
Although the soon-to-be-released TivoToGo aims to fix this all in one software update.
With the NetFlix/TiVo pairing you'd be off to a good start. There are a lot of series I would like to watch, that I have not yet (like BBC's The Office) - but with this I could rent the series DVD at my leisure. You can easily imaging a future where you pay a bit more to rent series episodes alone the day of release - making channels themselves a relic!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Being able to download DVDs to my TiVo is something I'd probably do occasionally when the video shop a couple of blocks from my home doesn't have what I want. On the other hand, if I could download better-than-DVDs to my high-definition TiVo, I'd probably go to my TiVo first, and check the video store if TiVo couldn't get it.
I thought they were independent, if they are partly owned by studios that could bode well for the service actually not being sued - and possibly for some draconian restrictions on use of downloaded media.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
been there done that: www.suprnova.org wheee :)
Sounds pretty cool, but what about those movies with DTS sound and higher quality? Is all that stuff going to be lost in the download? Netflix for me takes about a day or two to get a new movie (return it Tuesday, it's received Wednesday, get new one on Thursday), and for certain movies I wouldn't be willing to sacrifice my sound or quality just to get it somewhat quicker.
This Tivo/Netflix thing could work worldwide
couldent it?
And if Tivo units had a Conditional Access Module
it could be used for a worldwide pay per view
channel(eventually) more than one if combined
with Multicast i think?
First, they sell aggregate data, NOT data with your name attached to it.
Second, you can opt out of the data collection if you want. TiVo hackers have examined the data stream the TiVo sends before and after and confirmed that once you opt out, no data about your viewing habits is sent out.
Third, you don't have to pay a monthly fee in perpetuity. You can buy a subscription for the lifetime of the TiVo for $300-- which works out to paying the monthly fee for two years up front, after which the program listings are free.
As for the $300 package, $300 would buy me five years worth of TWC DVR service. I find it highly unlikely anyone will *really* be using that 5 year old modded TiVo at that point. Maybe some people would, but I'm usually much faster on the electronics upgrade cycle than that.
I wouldn't think the business model would be the stand-alone TiVo. It would probably be more like the DirecTiVo, currently available for free to new customers from many installers, with an additional programming cost of $5/month (which covers any number of DirecTiVo units in the house). In a year or two, they'll probably be offering the same deal for the High Definition TiVo.
It sounds nice in theory that you can download a
:)
:-\) :P)...
:)).
"DVD" to your TiVo and watch it, but there are
some serious cons to such a system (on TiVo
hardware)...
For one thing, TiVo doesn't have component
outputs, so you're stuck with SVIDEO. The DVD
video will be compressed even more than normal so
you lose picture quality even before the picture
goes over SVIDEO.
TiVo doesn't have S/PDIF out, so you can say
goodbye to Dolby Digital or DTS sound (most
importantly a discrete LFE channel). The audio
too, will be compressed more than normal. So even
without Dolby Digital or DTS you're still getting
much lower quality than the actual DVD.
And finally, nobody (I know anyway) has enough
free space on their TiVo to store these movies...
We're all too busy hoarding episodes of shows
we've been meaning to burn to DVD for months
ReplayTV's more suited to address the first two
issues (since they have S/PDIF and Component Video
outputs). Certain TiVo models have built-in DVD
burners, which only solves the 3rd problem...
Personally, if I wanted something on demand, I'd
use my cable company's VOD service. (Which DOES
have Dolby Digital soundtracks, but no DTS
and my cable box has component out. And there's
also HD VOD (something renting or owning the
actual DVD can't even offer
I'm equally surprised at the success of iTunes.
The music you download is noticably lossy, and
they don't offer lossless copies of anything you
buy (40+ Mb would be perfectly acceptable for this
audiophile
I suppose there are those who will always like
their thrills cheap and easy, making up the
majority of the customer base for online music
services right now. It remains unclear what will
happen to these service's customer bases once
HDTV sets and Dolby Digital / DTS home theatre
equipment becomes more mainstream.
TiVo would do much better if it were to upgrade
its "Home Media" option to allow PC -> TiVo video
x'fers and other services that ReplayTV offers.
I understand why they're hesitant to implement 1st
party video extraction. But injection of external
MPEG2 files would make a lot of people happy,
especially those folks with the DVD burner models.
I'd more willingly fork over a few extra bucks a
month for that than renting a DVD over TiVo.
How about "-1, Offtopic?" this post doesn't deal with tivo, netflix, or their partnership.
"oh yeah, that reminds me of something else entirely that i don't like that has to do with television somehow!"
For the majority of TiVo users this will not be equivilant to a DVD. It will be lower bitrate, 2-channel audio, interlaced, and S-Video output at best. It's a neat idea, but acutally renting or buying a DVD will still be better.
"This is a desperate move from a desperate company. Who cares about TiVo anymore? My Time Warner box gives me DVR functions for $5/mo and i don't have to buy any hardware. Remind me why I should buy a $300 box and THEN pay $12.95 per month?"
Why, because that Time Warner Cable DVR is a very poor substitute for a TIVO. With TIVO you can create wishlists based upon titles, actors, directors, keywords or categories and have them all recorded for you automatically. Say your son or daughter has a report to do on the civil war. With TIVO you can put in the keywords "civil war" and even specify that it should only record documentaries. I'd like to see your TWC DVR do that! TIVO also learns what type of programs you like and will auto-record suggestions for you (if you choose to). I also use wishlists to auto-record movies or other programs that I would like to see, but have no idea when they might be shown. We also have our TIVOs connected by a wireless network to a computer so we can play MP3s on the surround sound system in the living room.
Before we had TIVO we always complained that there was never anything on when we wanted to watch TV, even though we have over a hundred channels. Now TIVO always has more programming that we actually enjoy watching than we even have time to watch. The problem with having so many channels available is that it's necessary to provide better and more efficient ways to sort through that information. The programs most people want to see are there somewhere, you just have to get through all the junk to find it. That's the one thing cable companies still do not understand and TIVO has been the one to provide ways to do this.
In our house we don't even watch live TV anymore (or commercials). When we turn on the TV it's only watch the kind of programs we choose and network schedules are no longer something we even care about. That is what TIVO is about. It's about you controlling the TV, not the TV controlling you.
As far as I know, Tivo did not "invent" the DVR. I for one, saw the ReplayTV (Then Panasonic HS1000 Showstopper) far before I saw the Tivo on the shelves. One of my buddies back in school bought an open box, discontinued due to company changing hands Showstopper unit at Best Buy for like $100. I went over to his apartment and marveled at pausing live TV. Then, months later I saw a commercial for Tivo (that was back when I actually watched commercials since I did not have my automatic skip then). I watched the commercial, and thought to myself "Wow, they are gonna bring come competition to Sonic Blue.
Anyway, I don't know if other markets had Tivo first, but if they did it was a close battle. Let's not forget the innovation by the other early competitors as well. Tivo is a name brand (like Kleenex) now, but in my mind ReplayTV does better at all aspects of the game.
You don't even need to open the Replay unit to get unlimited hard drive storage. Just get DVArchive and install it on your PC, connect the Replay to the switdh using the (yes that's right standard) 10/100 port and now you have as much space as you can fit in all of your PC's for storing and archiving shows. You can browse and watch all of them as if they were on the Replay unit itself. Can Tivo do this out of the box with no extra fees or modding....?
I thought not...thank you for your time.
I hope they would not fill the whole thing with ads like cable and 'dish TV.
Also, what would happen if $DVD_John got one of these?
Holy grail. Movies. On. Demand.
And yes, it's of substantially higher quality than anything DirecTV had to offer when I was a subscriber. DirecTV, IME, absolutely sucks hairy ass. Blurry, chroma-rich blacks that were inevitably any color but; images so compressed faces "float" in dark scenes like disembodied spirits in the night - just a very washed out, low quality image. People who think their picture quality is acceptable are either nearsighted or have not seen how bad it looks on an HD set compared to even a relatively low quality DVD. I used to have a couple of Bjorks vids ripped from MTV and DirecTV defenders were always amazed when I would show them side by side screencaps compared to the DVD versions.
Can't find West Wing? Get a decent usenet account and do a search. Or just visit the newsgroup "alt.binaries.multimedia.west-wing." When dark Angel was on, ditto there (abm.dark-angel) - and ditto (now) Enterprise (one guess where to find those). True, the older shows can now be had on DVD and many of those shows are on my netflix wishlist - ripping them myself is easier than downloading shows because I have no bandwidth out here. But when I lived in LA and had DSL I didn't even have cable - I could get anything I wanted via pacbell and I could watch that material anytime I wanted. Hell, that was like five years ago - the quality of the online material since then has improved tremendously. Thanks to folks in the socialized broadband-active countries in euroupe and asia, several groups even carry raw HD VOB rips and ISOs of DVDs.
Copyright?
Yeah, right. When Hollywood starts demonstrating a valid recognition of our society's collective rights, I'll show some compassion for theirs.
The problem is with people who drop their landline service for VoIP (without the doohickey that connects to your internal house wiring) or cell phones. No phone line to connect to..
You will be able to order a DVD and have it appear sometime later on the Tivo.
Holy Crap!!
Tivo now has a built in Teleporter!!!
Oh, you meant a MOVIE/MOTION PICTURE.... nevermind...
I've been labouring under the assumption that a DVD was just the media that held the movie.....
Burma?
This sounds a lot like another company out there. I think anyone that says this about tivo doesn't have one. The interface is what makes tivo worth it, not just the functionality.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
Mod this up, this is a point that is missed. The tivo doesn't just record stuff. It changes the way you watch tv. It isn't time shifting, its video on demand. (cached on the client). This netflix idea is just building on that concept.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
I just checked out the online demo of the TWC DVR. That thing is nothing like a tivo. Where is actor, director, and genre based wish lists? I couldn't stand not having that. And what about season passes? Per-recording quality settings....the list goes on...
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
correct i knew that, but tivo seems to be the higher market share device. so i used that as an example. like the other post, they were developed pretty much together, yet seperate from each other and released to the world about the same time.. no argument there ;)
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
"As for the $300 package, $300 would buy me five years worth of TWC DVR service. ..."
You also get your $300 *back* if you go to sell your Tivo on eBay when it's time to buy an upgraded unit. Unlike the hardware, which will obviously be worth less, the $300 service fee will not depreciate.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
> I only pay $6.95 a month for TiVo service. Just call them up and threaten to leave
For real, or are you just making this up?
This is awesome if it comes to pass, but I wonder first, will I have to finally get a Series 2 or one of the Pioneer DVD-Rs? Also, how much bandwidth will it use? Hard drive space?
I have a Philips Series 1 with Turbonet and an extra hard drive (only 50 GB total, but that seems good enough for me.) However, I'm noticing there are image quallity problems, lots of stuff just isn't as sharp as live is. And I have it set to use Highest quality.
My setup: Tivo, DirecTV, 5.1 Koss DVD unit, 27" Sony Wega, using composite cables. Yeah, I know S-Video would be better (component even better) But I also use a selector box for my XBox, GameCube and PS2, which are all composite. But thats not problem. If I go direct from DirecTV to the Koss, it looks better.
So it makes me wonder how a movie is going to look. I have 8mbit DSL, so bandwidth isn't an issue for me, (unless this thing is going to do what TiVo does to TV input, watch it all the time...), but I figure they're going to need to compress the stream, maybe using an advanced mpeg4 codec (how about that new H.264 that Apple and DVD Forum is touting?
Mainly I've noticed the quality problems since I "inherited" the Wega from my Dad. Before I was using an older TV, so maybe its just that the Wega is so much crisper anyway that it brings out the flaws in the TiVo video codec?
Is there anything that can be done about that? Would a new TiVo box (either DirecTivo or DVD-R) have better quality? Do the newer boxes have better codecs?
Whats it going to be like with this Netflix over broadband to TiVo?
What does DVDs on demand mean? Especially with relation to the Tivo. It sounds like a download in the article, but that would be video on demand, not DVDs on demand. A DVD is a disk.
Or does it mean something like printing on demand where you would request a movie and they would press a disk and mail it to you? That sounds like DVDs on demand to me. However, that probably would not require a Tivo.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
I wonder if the economics of this will enable independent producers to distribute TV series without the big TV networks? Clearly you still need a big wad of VC cash to make your pilot, but aren't there other sources of that besides the networks?
This may have been changed by now, but before I got my TiVo Series2, I had read on the tivo.com page that you ARE able to use a TiVo as a HDD VCR, without the guide data. They just don't recommend it. So when I discovered this "30 day gotcha", I was slightly pissed.
aaaand...whee!
What ever happened to the second "D" in the term "DVD"?
-516
Considering that it costs atleast 50 cents per GigaByte using a CDN (such as akamai, etc), and that a DVD is about 4.5GB, the cost to serve comes to be more than $2 per movie. If Netflix wants to serve at a decent rate, they need to use a CDN. Leaving aside tivo's ability to do any serving among the boxes, i wonder how the economics would work for being able to serve.
Absolutely for real. It happened after I decided to try the cable company's DVR device. I wasn't really happy with the DVR from the cable company, but I was also not willing to spend more money for having a TiVo. I called TiVo to see if I could rattle the cage a little bit, and it took them about 30 seconds to come back with a counter offer -- $6.95 a month, forever.
The cable company's DVR is now safely back in their office, and I'm still enjoying the added benefits of TiVo on my home network.
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
Hmm, I've been thinking of getting another TiVo (or rather two Series 2 units, since my SA S1 is getting long in the tooth and SLOW). I might call them and tell them that, but that I consider $20 a month too much for two DVRs and that I'm considering switching to a generic cable company DVR.
Incidentally, how's the hackability of the S2 devices? I remember in the early days S1 owners stayed away in droves because it was supposedly harder to hack. Is show extraction happening meanwhile on the S2? I'd hate to give that up.
CAT5 makes dandy telephone wire... all you had to do was run 2 CAT5 cables over, wire one up as ethernet and use the other for phone (and then down the road use it as a 2nd ethernet).
But then, my rule for running cable in difficult spots is "run two, hopefully the mice won't chew both of them".