Amazon and TiVo - Working Together

Two of my favorite companies are working together to deliver downloadable movies to your TV.

This is pretty exciting. For one thing, this will skip the need for you to use a PC at all. In fact, a TiVo box is a PC (linux based). Most likely, you'll be able to use your TiVo remote to navigate to an Amazon based front end, select a show and buy it, just like Cable On Demand.

It explains a lot about why the "no brainer" merger of Apple and TiVo didn't happen. Apple clearly had it's strategy for getting content onto TV's with AppleTV. But there, you still need to surf the iTunes store, download it and then play it on your AppleTV. That's not nearly as easy as just using a remote, and it offers no DVR functionality. Who wants that thing?

The only other contender that I see for this space is Microsoft, who is rumored to be planning to use the XBox 360 as a platform to deliver TV content, probably by using the media extender functionality that allows your 360 to connect to your Windows Vista Media Center. Let's face it though, like all Windows stuff, it's gonna be big, slow and probably a bit messy. They'd love to have honest to goodness PCs attached to your TVs, but most people won't want that. And TiVo already has lots of boxes in homes everywhere.

My early money is on TiVoMazon.