In my Display Daily of March 9, I hailed the arrival of "Amazon Unbox on TiVo" as the first TV movie delivery service that electronically puts the movies where you want them - on your TV’s digital video recorder. That way you avoid the video stores, the physical discs and even getting up to load your DVD player. But you still needed to order online from your PC. Announced on Tuesday, the two companies have removed even that limitation, making the service even more friendly to couch sitters. They also tout the potential for the largest video-on-demand service anywhere. But some practical limitations remain.

John DiLoreto
Analyst and Editor for
Insight Media

The new feature is available to Series 2 and 3 TiVo set-tops connected to home networks. Users can browse, purchase (and now) even rent movies through their TV with the TiVo remote. The charge is between $1.99 and $3.99 to rent movies; $1.99 per episode to purchase TV shows; and between $7.97 and $14.99 to purchase movies. Back-catalog film downloads start as low as $1.99, a better alternative to the $10 charged by other download services.

Not only can you watch Unbox purchases on up to two TiVo boxes, you can also watch them on your computer and two portable devices. And they don’t need to stay on your TiVo’s hard drive. All of the purchased content is registered in Your Media Library at Amazon.com, ready for re-downloading to your TiVo (from your PC).

The popular TiVo user interface offers categories of popular movie & TV titles, including Top Movies, Kids & Family, Foreign Films, etc. In addition, Amazon Unbox integrates with TiVo’s new Universal Swivel Search that allows viewers to link from descriptions of one program to all others that have common elements, including program name, actors, or suggestions based on other viewers’ feedback.

With these two browse and purchase methods, customers can access titles from 8 major motion picture studios and over 30 television networks, one of the largest catalogs of downloadable titles available online. There are currently over 1,100 movie titles available for rent, and over 2,000 movies are available for purchase with dozens of new titles added on a weekly basis. See all Unbox videos available for download to your TiVo DVR. This is impressive, but still not quite the 30,000+ titles available from NetFlix or Blockbuster.

Other practical limitations? Unbox videos are not HD, or even DVD, quality, but "as good or better" than those recorded at the Best Quality on a TiVo Series 2. That’s a worthwhile tradeoff, though. A full 7GB DVD would take nearly 4 hours to download on even a 5Mbps broadband connection. TiVo’s got it down to less than a quarter of that time. Again impressive, but still not exactly "video on demand".

Fortunately, the Unbox RemoteLoad feature allows you to order from Amazon.com and download anywhere. So, you can order a video while at work and it will be ready to watch when you get home.

Another limitation is that the TiVoToGo and Multi-Room Viewing features have been disabled to meet studio demands. Yes, the studio greed factor is still at play here. But, we’ve come a long way, baby.

Related Links: unbox.amazon.com, www.tivo.com