According to this CBS marketwatch article, the potential Netflix – TiVo partnership is irrelevant.
The author states that more then likely the number of videos that will be available for download will be limited. Also, the author mentions the fact that Netflix has stated that the TiVo partnership is “not on any rollout timetable”.
At first I was very excited about this partnership however; after reading several articles and taking part in TiVoCommunity discussions, I’m a little uncertain as to whether or not this service will be worth while. Several questions need to be answered.
- How many vids will you be allowed to download?
- How much will it cost?
- How much space will be required and how long will it take?
- When will this partnership take place? Will it really take a year to implement?
- What will be the quality of the videos?
These and many more questions need to be answered by TiVo and Netflix….
I still think it could be valuable if done right, but the limited number of movies could be a big snag to make it a success. As far as your questions are concerned, I think the Tivo hardware is too underpowered to use the next generation compression (eg MPEG4, DIVX, XVID, etc) so they would probably send it down in MPEG2 compression. I believe 2 hours of video might get squeezed down to about 2Gigs so lets assume that for a second. Just for simplification, lets assume a DSL line with 500kb download speed so perhaps it could download 50KBytes per second or 180Mb per hour. That would take perhaps 11-12hrs worst case. Please correct me if I’m wrong because I’ve been drinking a beer and just can’t get motivated to think hard.
12hrs isn’t too bad if the service allows you to have 3 out at a time. You watch up to three on a given night, and it just churns away to catch up.
Other services claim quicker downloads (I believe they use better compression), but they allow people to start watching within a few minutes and download the rest as you view the first part.
The value of such a service is the simplicity and the potential wide selection. If they make it too complicated or don’t have enough titles, it’s going to be a hard sell.