TiVoFlix: Media Nirvana
With the arrival of the new TiVo HD, I began investigating all of the features that I missed out on while only having a Series1 TiVo. That search led me to check out Amazon Unbox, a feature added to TiVo in early 2007 that allows you to rent or buy movies from Amazon and have them downloaded directly to your TiVo. My first thought was “Where do I sign up?” After doing a little more digging, I found out that each movie rental is $3.99. Each rental movie can only stay on the TiVo for 30 days. Once you start the movie, you have 24 hours to finish it before it expires. Personally, I think that this is a horrible model and that TiVo could do better.
For almost three years now, I have been a dedicated Netflix user. I currently pay $16.99 a month for unlimited rentals of movies, three at a time. The Netflix model lets me create a queue of movies — as I write this, I have 50 movies sitting in my queue, with two at the house and one in transit. As I finish watching one of my three movies that I have at the house, I send it back to Netflix. Netflix takes the top movie in my queue and sends it back to me. My usual movie turn-around time is about three days. If I was able to watch movies quick enough, I could have a different movie every day of the month with the three day turn-around. Doing a small calculation shows that I only have to watch five movies in a month for Netflix to beat the price of Amazon Unbox. However, I still have not explained how I think TiVo could do better.
The beauty of TiVo is that I never have to think about when TV shows come on; I set the show up to be recorded and every new episode of the show appears on my TiVo after it airs. All I have to do is define what shows I want to watch; I do not have to worry about when they come on. The TiVo model meshes perfectly with the Netflix model. With Netflix, I define what movies I want to watch and they show up at my house. Now, let us imagine that TiVo integrated the Netflix service into their set-top boxes like they did with Amazon Unbox.
- The TiVo interface should allow me to search for a movie to add to my queue. TiVo already has an excellent interface for finding TV shows to watch; the same interface could connect in to Netflix’s Browse Movies interface. By selecting a movie, it would simply place the movie in the last space in your queue.
- The TiVo interface should allow me to manage my queue. Once again, TiVo already has excellent queue management that it uses for its Season Pass list. The user should be able to slide movies up and down in their queue, as well as remove movies from their queue.
- Where Netflix has the concept of a movie being At Home, TiVo should have the concept of the movie being On TiVo. So, if you are paying for the three movies at a time plan, three Netflix movies would be downloaded over broadband onto your TiVo. Here is where all of the magic happens. While the movie is On TiVo, you can watch the movie as many times as you want; it is just taking up one of your available slots. When you decide that you are done watching the movie, you simply delete it from the TiVo. This frees up one of your movies slots and the next movie in your queue begins to download. Now, movies are pretty large, so it may take a good bit of time for the movie to download. However, my broadband connect sits idle for most of the day; this would be a good use of it. I estimate that a movie could probably be downloaded in a day.
- I really like the concept of using dedicated Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down buttons to rate TV series that I watch. The TiVo interface should allow me to rate the movies that I watch accordingly. Then, an interface like the TiVo suggestions could hook into the Netflix recommendations system to recommend more movies for me to watch.
The appeal of this model is really the appeal of TiVo and Netflix. I have certain shows and movies that I want to watch; I really do not care when I watch them. So, the combination of TiVo and Netflix into some kind of TiVoFlix meshes with the way I consume visual media perfectly. I like the idea of setting a list of shows and movies that I want to watch and then just having them appear at some point in the future.