Amazon.com and Tivo Partner to bring Movie/TV Show Downloads to the Living Room

Perhaps the reason I’m so excited about this is that I was already planning on purchasing a TiVo TCD648250B Series3 HD Digital Media Recorder within the next several months (please, please let the price keep coming down) and these features just increase the value proposition of that purchase, but I also think the slickness of this end-to-end implementation is seriously enticing and poses a distinct challenge for Apple and their new Apple tv - especially since Apple’s only major movie studio partnership to date is with Disney and relies on the hardware constraint of the space on your hard drive.

• While the Amazon Unbox Store does not yet support Macintosh (grrr, what is it with everyone and the single DRM’d Windows solution?), bypassing all of that and going straight to my living room is fine.
• My digital library can sit on Amazon’s Media Library, I won’t need to buy physical DVDs (my collection is pretty huge already), and I won’t need to invest in new hardware (e.g. hard drives) to hold Gigabytes/terabytes of information. This appeals to my greener sensibilities. Amazon and Tivo should drum that angle up in the marketing.
• If I were to idly speculate (which I love), this solution gives Amazon/Tivo the option of upgrading the quality of the movies fairly seemlessly to the end-user. After all, users won’t have to have the movie on their own hard drive. Amaozn/Tivo could detect when I want to reload a movie out of my digital library and give me the option as to the quality I prefer (so I can match it to my setup). Even better, I’d probably just set a preference for the highest quality possible at any given time.

Amazon/Tivo, if you give me a rental option before the rest of the market can get there (something akin to Netflix without the mailing), I’ll be yours forever!

Disclaimer: I am a current employee at Amazon.com but I had no prior knowledge of this implementation. I do not currently possess any future knowledge about this which is not public. Cheers!