TiVo teams with Amazon to offer video downloads

Filed under: Business, Internet, Video, Web services

TiVo teams with Amazon to offer video downloads

by Chris Gilmer Feb 8th 2007

TiVo and Amazon have struck up a deal to offer video downloads. This coming after the recent news of Wal-Mart offering video downloads online through partnerships with Sony, Warner Brothers, Walt Disney, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, and Universal. The new service called Amazon Unbox on TiVo started testing on Wednesday. There are currently thousands of DVD-quality TV shows, and movies for purchase and rent at the store. You can search for the videos through Amazon.com or at the store directly. Amazon has set things up so that previews of the shows can be watched before purchase as well.

In order to play the Unbox videos, you must first have the player that is currently only available on Windows XP machines. Once the player is installed, and the video purchased, users will see their videos in the My Videos tab. All videos can be watched as they are downloading, so you by no means have to wait until they are complete to start watching them. In turn, you can also watch Unbox videos on your home TV by connecting your computer via an S-Video connection or a Microsoft Media Center PC. Understandably, users can only view the files using Amazon Unbox installed on the computer that originally received the downloads, but you can back up and store videos on DVDs and external hard drives--major copyright issues I presume. The license you receive from your video purchase allows for the video to be installed and run on two different computers. If your computers happen to crash and data loss occurs, don't fret, all of your purchased videos are available online in your Amazon.com account library waiting for you to download onto another machine.

So who's going to win out in this major online video battle? Wal-Mart's big box style, Amazon's online retailer special, or Apple's iTunes? Stay tuned to find out...

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I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

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