Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Netflix and Tivo - finally?

According to a Hacking Netflix post, Netflix may be nearly ready to roll out video on demand over the net. Could this be the Netflix/TiVo partnership finally coming to fruition?

Netflix and TiVo announced a partnership last year, although nothing's come of it yet. Perhaps it's finally starting to move along.

Netflix's CEO has stated publicly that downloadable movies is the direction he always intended to go. That's why the company isn't named "MailFlix".

There are three points to be made here:
  1. For those who ask why anyone would ever need 100Mbps to their home, here's an application that can use nearly all of the bandwidth that you can reasonably throw at it. In Japan, where 100Mbps is common, video on demand (VoD) is very popular and is, in fact, the only video service offered in their fiber to the home (FTTH) deployments.
  2. TiVo needs to get off of the ball and get rid of their requirement for an analog phone. The people with enough bandwidth to make this application viable are going to be the ones getting new high-speed services such as FTTH, and those people aren't going to have analog phones. (The phones in Verizon's Fios service look like analog, but they are converted to VoIP just outside of the house.)
  3. I am going to need a larger hard drive on my TiVo. Anyone want to but me one of these?

No comments: