Hot on the heels of Wal-Mart Video Downloads, Amazon is looking to attract more customers to its Unbox service by teaming up with TiVo. Currently in beta, "Amazon Unbox on TiVo" would allow owners of Series2 or -3 TiVos to download and play Unbox videos. Sorry, Series1 and DirecTV TiVo owners can't participate. Besides the TiVo, you'll also need an Amazon account, and you'll need to link it to your TiVo account. A movie download will take anywhere from an hour (with broadband) to five hours (with dial-up). Your downloads will appear on the TiVo's now-playing list. They will not work with the TiVoToGo or multi-room features, but you can download to other devices using Unbox RemoteLoad. More details from Amazon or TiVo.
Research firm Informa Telecoms & Media forecasts that there will be 151 million HDTV homes worldwide by the end of 2011 - a three-fold increase over the current total of almost 43 million.
Sure, satellite radio is great. But for many listeners, there are still times when they want to come back to earth, so to speak. For those listeners and those times, Cambridge SoundWorks offers a new line of high-performance radios, including this trio of terrestrials.
Bullish on Blu-ray? Need something to watch on that new player? Premiere.com and Soundandvisionmag.com have joined forces to give away a prize pack of eight Blu-ray discs, including The Usual Suspects, The Sentinel, Phone Booth, and Planet of the Apes to one lucky visitor.
In a turnabout from the traditional consumer electronics paradigm in which the hardware is given away for free or at drastically reduced prices in order to entice potential subscribers to sign on the dotted line and pay juicy monthly fees to the content provider, the HD Radio Alliance is now promoting the availability of a pricey HD Radio add-on for car stereos that will enable users to access free HD Radio content and services.
Just in case you've been living in a cave for the past week--or perhaps just live a normal healthy life, in which case I envy you--then you've heard about the Steve Jobs DRM manifesto. Jobs wants to have his DRM and denounce it too. His adroit repositioning of himself in the public eye bodes well for the continued vigor of iPod sales. The first and most amusing reaction came from the Recording Industry Antichrist of America, which enthused: "Apple's offer to license FairPlay to other technology companies is a welcome breakthrough and would be a real victory for fans, artists and labels." It would also mollify various European regulators who object to the binding of iTunes downloads to iPods. Only problem is, Apple offered to do no such thing. The emailed missive has not appeared on the RIAA site. More relevant, perhaps, was EMI's announcement that a large percentage of its catalogue would become available via no-DRM MP3 downloads. Apparently the Norah Jones experiment was a success. Warning: While MP3 is immune to DRM, it is not immune to watermarking that would embed purchase information in the track metadata. If a download with your name on it ends up in the P2P moshpit, you could be in big trouble.
Almost lost in the aftermath of <A HREF="http://www.ultimateavmag.com/news/20807walmart/">Wal-Mart's big announcement</A> that it was tackling the movie download space was the unveiling last week of the deal between Amazon and TiVo to partner on movie and TV show downloads. TiVo owners with broadband connections can now shop for video downlods from Amazon's Unbox and have the movies and shows sent directly to the TiVos- in their living rooms, connected to their TVs. The new service is called Amazon Unbox on TiVo.
