Netflix Meets Tivo: A Few Good Questions
Posted by Harry McCracken | Friday, October 01, 2004 9:01 AM PT
This has been a rumor for awhile now, but now it's fact:
Netflix and Tivo are teaming up for a service that will let Tivo owners download movies onto their Tivo boxes via a broadband connection. Netflix says the service will be available next year.
The announcement was vague enough that I'm left with more questions than answers. Such as:
What movies will you be able to get? Netflix's mail-order service offers tons of stuff, including every major release and then some. Will the Netflix/Tivo service be similarly comprehensive? Presumably content owners (aka movie studios) will have more say here than Netflix or Tivo. And so far, recalcitrant content owners have kept all the other music and movie download services from being anywhere near complete. (Another Net-connected movie box called
Akimbo hopes to avoid this issue by explicitly specializing in obscure content you can't easily find elsewhere.)
What will you be able to do with the movies? Are you "renting" a flick that will expire after a few days, or will it live on your hard drive for as long as you like? (The existing Netflix model might make sense here: You can keep a movie for as long as you want, but you can only store a predetermined number of films at any one time.) Will you be able to turn a movie to DVD or stream it to other devices in your home? Digital-rights management will certainly impose limits, as it does with other movie download services such as
Movielink, but it'll be interesting to see if those restrictions feel draconian or logical.
How long will it take to download a film? Even over broadband, downloading a movie with anything like decent quality can take awhile; if you want to watch a film on Friday night, you may need to launch the transfer before you go to bed on Thursday. Of course, that would still provide a speedier turnaround time than Netflix's current snail-mail system. But it may not really be "video on demand" so much as "video eventually after demand." (Then again, the Netflix/Tivo service
might qualify as VOD: The story I link to above says you'll be able to stream movies as well as download them.)
I own (and love) a ReplayTV box, so I may not be one of the first folks to benefit from the Netflix/Tivo alliance. But I'll certainly be following it. At some point, the companies will answer all my questions. Until then, does anyone reading this have any guesses or thoughts?
I've been predicting this alliance since April:
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=171116&highlight=Netflix
"What content?" is clearly the big question. What you can do with the movies is a lesser issue, unless they add a per-download charge, and then it becomes a big issue. You're right, the existing Netflix model is clearly what they should go with.
First, I LOVE my TiVo. That being said, what the hell is TiVo doing? Yes, the Netflix partnership is desireable, but I would much rather see TiVo expending its energies elsewhwhere (802.11g and USB 2.0 support, the somewhat illusory TiVo2go, a cablecard TiVo, DUAL TUNER, just to name a few).
As for Netflix, I agree that content is the key. If copyright holders prevent the offering of a wide selection of titles, this will end up being a case of much ado about nothing.
If they use decent compression like VP6/7 or H264 you could watch it on demand since the movies will only use 1gig or even less.
I doubt that current TIVO boxes have enough power to decode though.
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