Depending on the speed of your broadband connection, with a 5Mbps speed quoted, and naturally providing you have one of the compatible TiVo models, a two hour movie will download in approximately one hour, and an hour long TV show will download in around 30 minutes, giving you a video-on-demand service that lets you watch what you’re downloading just a few minutes after starting the download, with a faster broadband connections letting you watch video even sooner.       

The new download service, called “Amazon Unbox on TiVo” is already in beta testing with availability to 1.5 million homes expected ‘soon’, which could mean six weeks or six months or anywhere in between. 

TiVo’s CEO, Tom Rogers, in TiVo and Amazon’s press release, said that “TiVo is taking the best way to watch TV and making it the best way to get popular movies and television shows from major Hollywood studios. Now, TiVo subscribers can rent and purchase movies and TV shows and download them to their television set — all without leaving their homes.”

Bill Carr, video president of digital media at Amazon, said in the same press release that “By teaming up with TiVo, we are offering our customers another great way to watch their Unbox videos. Amazon Unbox offers customers the flexibility to watch their favorite videos where and when they want to whether that is on their PC, portable device or TV set through their TiVo box.”

Content includes movies and TV shows, and will be available to rent and purchase. Content providers who’ve signed on to sell TiVo owners content through the service include
CBS, Fox Entertainment Group, Lionsgate, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Warner Bros. Entertainment, with the natural expectation that other major TV and movie companies will also sign on in the not-too-distant future, with companies yet to sign on no doubt eager to see how popular the service starts becoming.

TV episodes will sell for US $1.99, and most movies will sell for between US $9.99 and US $14.99, with movie rentals starting at US $1.99.

Amazon’s Unbox video download service launched in September 2006 to offer thousands of movies, television shows and other videos for download to PCs and any Windows Media Video-compatible portable device.

But with the ability to also download straight to a TiVo box, something already hooked up as the main interface for all the video content you watch on your PC, and having that content integrated with programming recorded from TV gives one simple interface to navigate all of your viewing options.

So, why does TiVo look like it might be in the box seat for TV supremacy? Read onto page 2 to find out...