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Amazon & Tivo Take on Netflix
RadioTV writes "Amazon is in Beta testing with select Tivo users to allow Unbox videos to be downloaded to Series 2 and 3 set-top boxes. The FAQ for the service is available." The price point for movies is fairly reasonable. No HD and won't work with DirecTV's obsoleted HD tivo, but this is a step in the right direction.
Read those EULAs, ppl:
Amazon Unbox to Customers: Eat shit and die
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I have Sunday ticket with no phone line. In fact I've never had a line to any of my boxes. Just call them up and order and they will activate it via the stream.
I used to be with IT..now IT seems strange and scary to me.
I can't be the only one who thinks this is a cool idea. If you look at the FAQ, you can even erase it from the Tivo and download it again when you want to watch it. Sounds like an offsite movie storage arrangement simply for the cost of Unbox movies.
It's not as cool as what Netflix is already doing, which is letting you stream movies basically for "free" if you're already a subscriber. You get an hour's worth of streaming for every dollar you spend with them per month. And you can watch the same movie over and over if you want to. The quality is also better than Unbox (if you've got a good net connection - it automatically selects your quality level.)
You also really only get charged for the time you use... if you select a 2 hour movie and watch 5 minutes before deciding it sucks, you only get charged for 5 minutes, not the whole movie. Big difference from Unbox. And you can start watching immediately, you don't need to wait for a download.
You can argue about TiVo being hooked up to a person's TV vs. streaming over a computer, but TiVo doesn't exactly have a huge market share; I'd wager at least as many people have their PC's hooked up to a TV as have TiVo. And with people watching more video on their computers anyway, I'm not sure the distinction is really going to matter in a few years. A monitor will be a monitor.
From the press release:
Customers can purchase television episodes for $1.99, purchase most movies for between $9.99 and $14.99, or rent movies starting at $1.99.
(Emphasis added)
TiVo/Unbox solves two major digital movie distribution problems: displaying on television and dealing with the lack of backups. If the price-point for rentals stays in the $2 range (the supermarket where I rent from is usually $1 or $1.50), then you've actually got something that might actually work for the average family.
Here's the link to a plain-english read on it by the chicago tribune: http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ez orn/2006/09/scary_movie_dow.html
_ to_cust.html
m l/ref=atv_dp_cs_use/002-8388024-7705601?ie=UTF8&no deId=200026970
Here's an explitive laced though pretty good summary: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/15/amazon_unbox
Here's the EULA: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.ht
From the bottom of my heart, I thank all unbox consumers for abaondoning the decades of time and people's effort to create and guard the principal that I own my media.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I don't reply to Anonymous posts; if you have something to say to me, identify yourself or I won't reply.
Yep, it's still in a limited roll-out phase. My account was enabled for it a week or two ago and another here at my office still says "available by June 2007".
-- What did Spock find in Kirk's toilet? The captain's log.
Remember, it's rentals starting at $1.99.
If you look at the actual 1018 movies available to rent on their site, and sort by price, you'll see only the bottom ~10% (110 movies) are available at $1.99.
Then 208 movies are available at $2.99.
And the remaining 700 movies, the vast majority of their collection, including anything most people would be interested in watching, are $3.99 to rent (more than double the advertised starting price).
I've said before that I would only be interested in online rentals if they can get within spitting distance of the $1.xx per disc I pay at Blockbuster Online or Netflix. $1.99 for everything would just barely meet that qualification, $1.99 for a few token b-movies (or c- or d-movies), and twice that for everything else does not qualify.
(Of course, I have neither a Windows box, nor a Tivo, so the service would be useless to me anyway. I wonder if/when companies are finally going to realize that a disproportionate number of early adopters are mac users...)
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Unavailability of shows in HD is a significant negative. The XBox360 will download many shows in HD, although the list of available shows (for any quality) is very limited. But are we sure that they won't have HD? The FAQ just says "better than series 2 best quality." For that matter, for a lot of shows I'd be satisfied with DVD quality...wide-screen 480p.