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View Full Version : Newsweek: Netflix & TiVO To Team Up


Suhit Gupta
09-08-2004, 02:00 AM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5915470/site/newsweek/' target='_blank'>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5915470/site/newsweek/</a><br /><br /></div>"Netflix and Tivo ushered in an age of couch-potato bliss. Netflix lets its customers browse through its huge movie catalog on the Web and rent DVDs through the mail without having to worry about late fees. TiVo lets people digitally record their favorite shows and zoom through the ads. But now couch potatoes are perched on the cusp of true paradise. Soon they won't even have to stand up to trudge to the mailbox; fat broadband pipes will let them directly download movies over the Net to their television<br />...<br />Later this month, NEWSWEEK has learned, the companies 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 into the TiVo boxes in their homes, instead of receiving them in the mail."<br /><br />Couch-potato nirvana is right. It is interesting that no one thought of this kind of service before. In fact, i am sure someone at Blockbuster must be really upset that they didn't think of this before. I guess this is an attempt to steal those customers back that chose to go with DVR service coupled with some cable service, because cable providers typically offer Pay-per-view and Movies-on-demand.

hawkeye
09-08-2004, 11:20 AM
I can't wait to see how this is implemented... 8O
...Could you keep downloaded movies indefinitely...
...How long would a download take, at least a couple hours, or a full day...
...Will my DirecTivo box have the service available when all the other Tivo boxes do or will this be like HMO?

The only thing curbing my excitement is Jack Valenti and the like :twisted: If the MPAA doesn't approve of the implementation you can bet they'll cut the lawyers loose.

Suhit Gupta
09-08-2004, 01:02 PM
If it is anything like Movies-on-demand or Pay-per-view, it would be a 24 hour thing. And I think it would be streamed to the box. Cable providers are already doing this. The movies are probably not in HD so it wouldn't take that long.

Suhit

Felix Torres
09-08-2004, 02:47 PM
It is interesting that no one thought of this kind of service before. In fact, i am sure someone at Blockbuster must be really upset that they didn't think of this before. I guess this is an attempt to steal those customers back that chose to go with DVR service coupled with some cable service, because cable providers typically offer Pay-per-view and Movies-on-demand.

Actually, Disney has a similar service in place in several cities and they're expanding it next year. It streams movies over the air and caches them on a HD so there is always a collection of movies on the drive for viewing.
The problem is, like current cable-based on-demand systems, you only get to choose from the set of movies that are active at a given point in time.

The Netflix system sounds like it might be a version of this, based on how they describe it; delivering dvd rentals via the net. I suspect they'll be doing background downloads of a customer-selected list, rather than true on-demand streaming.
Still, TiVo does provide some streaming capability so maybe (hopefully) they'll be using that...

For Netflix to be a winner, it needs to provide at least two out of three features:
- DVD or better quality
- Significantly cheaper per movie price
- Full catalog availability on demand

The first is the least likely if they're using existing Tivo boxes since TiVo doesn't do HD except on the new high-end boxes.
If they do provide HD movies, then they could get away with a higher viewing price or limited movie availability but I suspect HD is not on their radar.

Download price is tricky because some would argue that the convenience of the service should command a premium but the fact is that unless they are offering "any movie-any time" capability they will be competing against cable systems on-demand movies that are already priced comparably to physical rentals at the neighborhood Blockbuster or whatever. And those don't require customers to go out and get a Tivo box for a big up-front expense.

And, of course, the size of the catalog offering can't really be total because the back-end costs for storing the movie image files and the bandwidth to send them out would get out of hand for a system ramping up.

So, yes, this could be big; a major leap towards the any movie-any time vision of the old Qwest commercials, but the reality will probably fall short in either quality, price, or flexibility.

What will be most interesting to see is what compromises they make to get the thing to work.

Suhit Gupta
09-08-2004, 02:59 PM
I agree with you that the DVD or better quality is least likely. Especially since, as hawkeye alluded to, download speed will become very slow.

Proce is probably still going to be in the $4 for a 24 hour viewing period. That appears to be the going rate these days.

The full catalog shouldn't be too hard since NetFlix already has a ridiculously large collection, it is just a matter of digitizing it. It is, from a systems administration/setup standpoint, very interesting how they will implement this. They will clearly have to have a large database of movies + the actual content (which is probably going to be in the tens of terabytes) replicated in many places. I just set up one such node, i.e. with 10+ TB of storage and I can assure you that it isn't cheap (even if one goes with SATA hard drives and not fibre drives). Although they may go with some sort of robotic DVD jukebox? Hmm probably not.

Suhit

Crocuta
09-09-2004, 12:26 AM
I agree with you that the DVD or better quality is least likely. Especially since, as hawkeye alluded to, download speed will become very slow.


Yeah, the Series 1 and 2 DVRs just can't show that kind of resolution. That's a shame. The idea of this sounds great, but I'd only consider it after one day getting a HD Tivo. For now, the whole point of watching a DVD for me is to get that crisp widescreen picture that looks SO much better than Tivo's every day TV fare.