Crooks.net

Tivo is, indeed, hooked into our broadband. We are fortunate to have Time Warner cable broadband, and it’s plenty fast for this kind of thing. Someone surfing at the same time as a download would barely notice. I also have an 802.11n network (as well as separate ‘g’ and ‘b’, but that’s beside the point) so our local wireless network also handles capacity quite well.

Amazon’s Unbox service can be directly linked to all the Tivos in your house. The usual method of operation is to access Unbox from your computer to pick you content, which can either be a movie rental or purchase, or a TV show purchase. You can then direct it to any Tivo that you have linked to your account and it will magically soon show up there for viewing. You also have the option of hitting Unbox from the Tivo, but you get a more limited selection to choose from.

One nice thing about Unbox is that they will hold your purchases for you, similar to Audible. (Funny now that Audible was just bought by Amazon.) So I can buy a movie or TV show, watch it on the Tivo, delete it, decide 8 months later I’d like to see it again, and download it all over again (which is no big deal with broadband) for no additional cost. iTunes makes the consumer responsible for managing purchased content, which is kind of a pain. But not too bad with today’s dirt cheap hard drives.

The technical details are hardly “daunting” with Unbox. You click Buy or Rent and you’re done. With the Apple TV box it’s even less daunting because there you don’t need a computer at all. The interface is typical Apple and very well done. Find your show for purchase or rent, click, and 10 seconds later you can start watching. How can that not be appealing?

As for “stuck with the capacity of the Tivo”, do you realize how much will fit on a Tivo? Ours hold dozens of shows. We’ve never run out of room, and we store a lot of stuff on there for later viewing. We’ve never even come close. That’s not a problem, Dave.

We definitely have different viewing habits. I rarely watch anything twice. Time is too precious and there’s too much out there that looks interesting. And how do you know if it’s worth watching multiple times before you’ve even watched it once? This is the reason my DVD purchasing habit has fallen to essentially zero in the last few years. We have a long shelf of DVDs that — for the most part — gather dust. But it doesn’t really matter. Both Unbox and Apple TV support both types of viewer. I’m a renter and you’re a buyer. I just find the cost of a TV show too high at today’s prices so I want to rent it for less.

So what’s the appeal of downloading? Tell me what the alternative is. DVDs? Yuck. They’re slow to load, give you very annoying FBI screens you can’t fast forward through, you have to swap them in and out, make sure you don’t lose them, and unless you have a really smart player you can’t stop in the middle of one and pick back up a month later right where you were. For quite a long while now I’ve been getting our rented Netflix discs and immediately ripping them and putting the movie on the Tivo. It just makes watching them way more convenient. When we manage to finish the movie I delete it and ship the disc back to Netflix for the next one.

(I suspect that some of the difference between us here is that you get to actually finish what you watch in one session, while I don’t. We can rarely even finish a short TV show in one sitting. Add to that that we have 4 people watching different shows at different times and frequently stopping in the middle. With a Tivo [or Apple TV] that’s no big deal, but would be a nightmare with DVDs.)

There’s also speed. Netflix is fast because they have a shipping facility in my town, but it still takes a couple of days. It’s not unheard of for us to pop over to Hollywood Video to get a disc just because we want to see something in particular that very night. With Apple TV you never even have to stand up. Pick what you want and it’s pretty much ready to go.

And for some people there’s quality. (This is not much of a factor for those of us with smaller size TVs.) Apple TV promises HDTV downloads. That’s better than DVD. (But not better than HD-DVD/BluRay.) In my case, compared to letting the Tivo catch shows there are no commercials to skip through, a feature I’m very fond of.

I guess I don’t understand what’s not to like about something like the Apple TV or even Amazon Unbox. I suppose if you had crappy bandwidth that might be a limitation. Upgrade your connection. :-) I’m surprised that you’d prefer having all those little discs of silicon floating around your house over having everything nicely ready to go from a hard drive. (No comments allowed about data loss — I have a fantastic automatic backup process and I wouldn’t lose my data even if my house burned down. Can you say the same for your bazillion DVDs?) Even if you purchase all your content instead of renting, you could hold everything very nicely on a pretty inexpensive terabyte hard drive. I’ve heard comments from many people who have taken all their many, many DVDs and ripped them to a hard drive for easy access through something like Apple TV. These are very, very happy people.

Be aware that Apple TV also allows full access to all of your music. No more CDs to mess with, which is another win across the entire family. The Tivo allows for this kind of thing also, but it’s not nearly as slick.

I think maybe you’re being a little stodgy and have a bit of a “what was wrong with the old way” attitude. For me it’s all about 1) saving money and 2) ease of use. Having an entire family who wants to access content makes #2 important, and right now the Tivo (and the way we use it) is doing a great job. I think that Apple TV can probably do it even better, and potentially cheaper.

Netflix, unfortunately, is PC only right now. We’re a Mac house. In addition, streaming to the PC doesn’t really work for us. It’s really hard to sit around a computer to watch a show as a family, and it’s pretty rare when I have time to watch a show by myself. And if I do get a chance I usually watch it on m iPod in bed or something similar.