{"id":243,"date":"2007-03-15T23:38:59","date_gmt":"2007-03-16T07:38:59","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2016-05-25T23:34:31","modified_gmt":"2016-05-26T06:34:31","slug":"amazon-unbox-for-tivo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/archive\/2007\/03\/amazon-unbox-for-tivo","title":{"rendered":"Amazon Makes Your Tivo Much, Much Better"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/blog\/images\/inline\/fearandloathing.jpg\" width=\"202\" height=\"300\" alt=\"\" class=\"rightinline\" \/>Ever since replacing my god-awful Comcast DVR with a high definition Series 3 Tivo, I&#8217;ve really only had one complaint about this beautiful machine: it doesn&#8217;t support on-demand programming.  In other words, even though Comcast would love to charge me $3.99 to watch an on-demand movie, I can&#8217;t do it anymore because I don&#8217;t use their hardware.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a small price to pay for the greatness that is <em>real<\/em> Tivo service, but it is a legitimate disadvantage.  It was with great happiness then that I noticed Amazon&#8217;s new Tivo on-demand movie service: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/tg\/browse\/-\/16261631\/ref=topnav_storetab_atv\/105-2219774-0998832\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Amazon Unbox&#8221;<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s how the service works:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Go to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/tg\/browse\/-\/16261631\/ref=topnav_storetab_atv\/105-2219774-0998832\" target=\"_blank\">Amazon<\/a> and find a movie or TV show you want to watch.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Rent&#8221; or &#8220;Buy&#8221; it with one click.<\/li>\n<li>Within 15 minutes, it begins downloading to your Tivo and is available to watch as soon as the download is complete.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>To my pleasant surprise, the movie files aren&#8217;t highly compressed 500 megabyte slugs but rather super high quality 2 to 2.5 gigabyte files.  To my even greater surprise, these files made their way to my Tivo in about an hour each.  Not that I would evvvvver BitTorrent a movie, but the last time I tried to torrent 2 gigabytes, it took all weekend.  2 gigs in an hour is great, and my cable connection usually only peaks out at around 2 or 3 megabits.  Considering a trip to the video store and back for most people is, say, 20-30 minutes, and waiting for your movies from Netflix is a day or two, Amazon&#8217;s Unbox service compares favorably in the time department.<\/p>\n<p>I do have four complaints about the service, all of which I&#8217;m sure will be dealt with shortly:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The selection seems a bit weak right now.  I downloaded The Illusionist, Network, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but besides those, there aren&#8217;t many I really want to watch.  Actually, there are plenty which are &#8220;Buy&#8221; only, but buying movies never made any sense to me.  As of right now, Amazon lists 1799 &#8220;rentable&#8221; titles ($2.99-$3.99) and 3246 &#8220;purchasable&#8221; titles ($15-$20).  My prediction?  The &#8220;buy&#8221; offering will fall flat on its face and the &#8220;rent&#8221; offering will thrive.  Once more titles are made available for renting, I&#8217;ll be using this service every week.<\/li>\n<li>Seeing as I&#8217;m downloading these movies faster than real-time, I should be able to start them a few minutes after the download <em>begins<\/em>&#8230; not when it ends.  At that point, it&#8217;s basically true on-demand.<\/li>\n<li>You have 24 hours to watch whatever you rent, after you first hit &#8220;play&#8221;.  Many people will cry bloody murder about this, but I&#8217;m really fine with it if the window were just extended to 48 or 72 hours&#8230; and I believe it will be.<\/li>\n<li>Although the video is virtually DVD quality, eventually it will need to be offered in high definition.  Better compression schemes should make this easily possible before too long.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>All in all, I&#8217;m loving the service so far, but I just hope their rental selection expands quickly.  If you&#8217;d like to try Amazon Unbox and get your first $15 worth of downloads for free, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/video\/tivo\/ref=amb_link_4531412_1\/105-2219774-0998832\" target=\"_blank\">click over to their free offer here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Amazon and Tivo have clearly beaten Apple to the punch, which makes me wonder yet again why Apple and Tivo &#8212; such perfect bedfellows &#8212; have never consummated their love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ever since replacing my god-awful Comcast DVR with a high definition Series 3 Tivo, I&#8217;ve really only had one complaint about this beautiful machine: it doesn&#8217;t support on-demand programming. In other words, even though Comcast would love to charge me $3.99 to watch an on-demand movie, I can&#8217;t do it anymore because I don&#8217;t use [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[282,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-original","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}