Oh happy day! NEWSWEEK: Netflix, TiVo to Unveil Partnership Sunday September 5, 10:57 am ET Subscribers Can Download Netflix DVDs Over the Internet Onto TiVo Boxes NEW YORK, Sept. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Later this month, Newsweek has learned, Netflix and TiVo plan to unveil a simple but significant partnership that could shake up the media world. Subscribers who belong to both services will be able to download their Netflix DVDs over the Internet directly onto the TiVo boxes in their homes, instead of receiving them in the mail. San Francisco Correspondent Brad Stone reports in the September 13 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, September 6) that even though spokespeople at the companies refused to comment on what one called rumor, one insider, who was close to the negotiations, says the straightforward partnership is all but a done deal, pending only the approval of the TiVo board this week: "You don't need a lot of creativity to figure out the details," the insider said. Netflix lets customers rent DVDs through the U.S. Mail, but is fighting cheaper copycat services from Blockbuster and Wal-Mart. TiVo lets people digitally record their favorite TV programs and zoom through the ads. A TiVo-Netflix partnership would create headaches for media giants, reports Stone. Cable customers could prefer the larger Netflix selection and download movies to their TiVo boxes using cable's own pipes. Unlike the phone companies, which are regulated as "common carriers" and forbidden from discriminating against customers or content, cable firms don't have to accommodate their rival's traffic on their networks. But if cable closes the door to the Netflix downloads, customers could migrate to the phone industry's broadband offering, DSL. http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040905/nysu012_2.html
awesome but i'd rather opt to recieve the DVD instead though because I don''t have a TIVO in ym HT room
This sounds cool but.... 1. when will it be available? 2. cost? 3. does the dvd contain any of the extras or only the movie? I bet just the movie. Also would you get to have subtitles, widescreen, etc?
How long would it take to download a DVD quality movie? I'm not talking about that VCD crap, but in the actual DVD format, isn't it several gigabytes of data for one standard length movie? Even on a high speed connection, that could take hours, I would think. Anyone know the details?
Most DVDs these days are roughly 8.5GB, so I imagine it could take some significant time to download an entire DVDs worth over the Internet. So how long would someone getting 1.5MB/sec on their cable modem have to wait to get it downloaded? Something like 20 hours? And my DSL gets speeds about half that, so would someone like me be looking at nearly two days to get a single movie? The mail would still be significantly faster.
Seeing as how my turnaround time is nearly 5 days for a DVD since I one day returned a DVD the same day it was mailed to me... i don't care if it takes 20 hours. It can d/l during my sleep or while I'm at work. This way, I'm guaranteed a new movie EVERY DAY!!!! And with Tivo2Go, I can "do my thing" daily!
How does the TW I-Control work ..... when I watch a movie through that would it be considered DLing it? I bet it won't take nearly the time you guys are suggesting, however, I also don't see how someone could say, ohh I don't know, make an archival copy of said DvD this way. Not that I condone that.
As far as the download time I imagine they will use some form of compression like divx or mpeg4 which will drastically reduce the size, but retain the quality. mpeg2/DVD is a beast.
Even if you cut the size by 2/3rd, it's over half a day for a single download on my connection and nearly two days of constant downloading for the three movies I now get at once through the mail. I don't mind Netflix offering something like this, but if it means leaving the DVD by mail business, I'm against it because I don't want to devote my broadband connection to downloading movies (and I don't have a TiVo anyway).
This isn't a near-term thing. Rental by mail is going to be around for quite a while yet. Do you really expect broadband speeds to not increase in the future? I already get 3 Mbps with DSL. I don't think I would be "devoting" my broadband connection to downloading movies when I let a couple movies download overnight.
I expect broadband speeds to increase in the future, but that may well be a serious long-term thing. I mean, it's not as if my speeds are any faster than when I first got DSL five years ago (at a different location), and that's as fast as it gets with my provider (in the heart of the "telecom corridor") And if even with a movie compressed to 1/3 of current size, it takes 14 hours to get one movie at my current speed, that's not an overnight thing for me for just one movie, let alone getting a couple of movies overnight as I sleep. I'm not going to worry about it or get excited about the possibilities if it's something that's a decade or more into the future (if ever) before it's something feasible for the average consumer.
