Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2007 > July > 10 > Entry
A good time to be a movie fan with broadband
Amazon and TiVo seemed like a good match before, but now the deal seems even sweeter for movie fans with direct access to Unbox movies via the TiVo.
For those who lack a computer (then what are you doing buying stuff on Amazon?) or simply don’t want to move two feet to get to the laptop, this removes a step and makes things easier to use. Behold the online-movie-buying remote control. (Shudder, o ye PPV offering; you’re so 1994.) Unfortunately, not everyone has a real TiVo (mine, offered by DirecTV, is crippled in this regard with no network connection; I doubt it will ever taste these services as DirecTV has left its TiVo subscribers stuck with features dating back to around 2002). If you’re an Amazon customer, a TiVo customer and someone who is willing to buy movies online, you fall into the desired target, but that number to me doesn’t seem that huge.
Recently, I started using Netflix’s “Watch Now!” service, which generously deposits hours of online viewing into your account comparable to how many dollars you spend per month. It works great as long as you:
- Are willing to use Internet Explorer as your browser, an option many find odious.
- Are on a Windows machine. See “Odious,” previous bullet.
- Are willing to watch a movie on your computer screen.
I watched “Zach Galifianakis: Live,” which looked fantastic, sounded great, and streamed very nicely on a fast home connection. But it was on a computer screen, not my TV, and short of lugging my desktop downstairs, that was the only way I’d be watching it.
So, you’ve got Netflix inching in, Amazon and TiVo pleasing the TiVo faithful (are they dwindling in numbers? I’m not really sure.) and Apple not really doing much with Apple TV since its launch except adding YouTube.
Disc-free online delivery of on-demand content is certainly the future, but who’ll be the dominant player is still unclear and nobody seems to have found an end-all, be-all solution that will work for most would-be movie buyers without some major compromises.
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