Amazon Unbox on TiVo

Wednesday, February 07, 2007


Today Amazon will start testing its download service on TiVo. The service, officially named Amazon Unbox on TiVo, will be initially available to a selected and small group of TiVo users. The final plan is to offer Amazon Unbox on TiVo to Tivo’s 1.5 million DVR subscribers.

This partnership should certainly help both Amazon and TiVo to increase their revenues. Amazon, by reaching a huge base of TiVo DVR customers, The annoucement of this deal comes less than 24 hours after Wal-Mart announced an online digital video store.

TiVo will benefit by adding more great content to offer to its customers. The TiVo DVR will now be able to offer movies and TV shows to TiVo customers. The customers will have the possibility to both rent or buy the content to watch on their TiVo DVR.

The price of renting and buying content is the same as the regular Amazon Unbox service. Single TV episodes cost $1.99 while the price for the movies ranges from $9.99 to $14.99. 24-hours rentals of the movie available on Amazon Unbox are instead priced at $2.

TiVo customers are required to have a Series2 or Series3 broadband capable TiVo DVR. Amazon will modify the DRM protection scheme to work on Tivo Linux. The only change for the user is a new menu on the TiVo DVR software that will give access to the Amazon Unbox content.