March 9th, 2007
Amazon's Unbox marriage to TiVo: Right architecture. Wrong execution?
When I first heard about the planned nuptials between Amazon's Unbox service and TiVo boxes, I remember thinking about how this is a real glimpse of the future (as well as a source of Steve Jobs' paranoia). Through Amazon Unbox, you can buy or rent downloadable TV shows and movies. At first, Unbox only worked on the so-called PC-side of the house. In other words, unless you had a media center PC of some sort, viewing an Unbox-sourced TV show or movie in your living room wasn't going to happen.
That changed though when Amazon and TiVo announced that instead of using a PC to acquire content from the Unbox service, that you'd be able to use a Series 2 or Series 3 TiVo box to do it. That "architecture" isn't just disruptive to the status quo (buying DVDs in the store or renting them from Netflix, Blockbuster, or your local cable provider on-demand style). In my opinion, it's also a much better approach to the future living room Steve Jobs has in mind; the one where an AppleTV device sits in your home entertainment center, but needs a PC running iTunes somewhere to act as the intermediary for routing iTunes-sourced content to your TV or stereo.
Two things make the Unbox/TiVo approach the right approach. First, "look Ma! No iTunes-running PC needed." That's right. To need a third device the way AppleTV needs one is actually a step backward from what's technically feasible today. Why have three entities (the content source, a computer, and a set-top box) when you should be able to get away with two (the content source and the set-top box). The other bit of elegance is how all of the content that's accessible to you (whether it comes from Unbox or your local cable provider) is available through a single interface.
Unfortunately, if you caught today's CRAVE review of the pair in action, you'll may find that the dynamic duo tastes great on the surface, but is ultimate less filling (literally of your wide screen display). Here are the major bullet points from the review:
- In the TiVo's guide, in order to distinguish between content that's available from your cable provider vs. that of Unbox, you have to search on the word "TiVo." Maybe that's a little too integrated. CRAVE's suggestion: have a separate screen. I agree.
- Compared to other content sources (the cable network, Netflix), the title selection is somewhat limited. Amazon expects the list to get beefed up.
- You can't watch downloaded content until it finishes downloaded. It may be faster than waiting for a delivery from Netflix, more convenient than running out to blockbuster, but it doesn't compared to how on-demand typically works. (also, download times invariably exceed playback times).
- $4 rental only good for 24 hours. That may match the cost and duration of on-demand content from the local cable provider. But then again, Netflix lets you keep content for longer. An extra day or two would be nice and poses no real threat to the Unbox/TiVo business model if you think about it.
- Incompatible with wide-screen HD displays. You'll have to read the CRAVE review to see what went wrong. But based on what I read, things went horribly wrong.
- Video quality isn't up to snuff. If you have to wait in for the entire download to complete before you can view it, the video quality should be better than what you get from on-demand cable content that can start right away. Not worse. By the way, CRAVE used episodes of My name is Earl acquired from on-demand and Unbox to compare.
- No SurroundSound. This isn't a problem for Series 2 TiVo owners since the Series 2 only does stereo. But if you have a Series 3 box, get ready for two channel audio.
None of these problems are unfixable. Makes for a good checklist for some product manager and engineer somewhere to pin up on their wall.
