TiVo adds Blockbuster to online movie partners
Blockbuster and TiVo today announced a partnership that will, by the second half of the year, allow owners of TiVo set-top boxes connected to broadband Internet service to streamdownload movies on demand to their TV sets for around $4 apiece. Blockbuster will also begin selling TiVos at its walk-in stores.
The takeaway: This partnership adds Blockbuster to the growing list of companies—Netflix and Amazon, primarily—that already have deals to allow TiVo owners to access movies on their TV. For TiVo owners, the deal allows access to newer offerings—more like the movies you find on cable or satellite pay-per-view services—than those of Netflix, which mostly offers streams of older films and TV shows, free with your Netflix subscription.
Blockbuster is describing its movie offerings, including the limited HD titles, as being near-DVD quality, consistent with what we found when we tested the service service on the company's own set-top box, plus streaming services from Netflix, Apple and others. The TiVo arrangement requires a broadband connection to the box—something that fewer than a third of TiVos now have, according to the New York Times.
The deal, along with the recent trimming back of the store rentals included in the Blockbuster Total Access subscription service, seems to further indicate that even Blockbuster sees the brick-and-mortar video store as a slowly declining source of movies.
Indeed, a survey of ConsumerReport.org subscribers by the Consumer Reports National Research Center confirmed that stores are increasingly being wedged out by mail-order subscription and kiosk services. (Subscribers can check out the results in our Ratings of movie rentals.)
[Note: Blockbuster OnDemand is a progressive download service, not a streaming service. That means it sends the movie to TiVo’s hard drive, although you can start watching the movie before the whole file has been downloaded. —Ed.]
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