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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."
"...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.
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?
I think a more revolutionary solution would be to allow remote queuing/renting of movies. Think of it this way:
You're at work and you hear about this really funny new Zombie movie called "Shaun of the Dead". You check Netflix and they have it for DVD in 3 days or TiVo delivery that evening.
The netflix website interfaces directly with the TiVo network and you schedule a download of the movie.
When you get home it's completely downloaded to your TiVo (or darn close to it) and you can enjoy the movie without waiting.
It'd be something that I know I'll look into, for sure.
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
It is an interesting concept, but take a look at this:
- Cable/Sattellite companies have the capability to stream high-res content to your TV
- Cable/Sat companies have thecapability to have different people watching different channels
- Cable/Sat companies have vast amounts of storage space and proccessing power.
What, therefore, stops them from ripping all of the DVD's in, say, NetFlix's library into their format, storing it on their server, and putting up a request system.
Then, any time someone would want to watch a movie, they'd simply have to hit a button, and the movie would be queued from the provider's central server, and streamed immediately and directly to the user's channel using a server/client setup. Considering the amount of processing power needed to play/stream a DVD is a nominal 500-700MHz, and these people's server power, I think this is more than possible. Question is, where the hell is it.
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.