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Cox to offer retail TiVo Premiere DVRs next year, first with cable VOD & Amazon, Netflix access
TiVo users, even with boxes provided by their cable company in the case of RCN and Comcast, have so far had to make a compromise: Choose their cable company's video on-demand offerings, or bring their own DVR and access online video from sources like Amazon and Netflix -- but that's no longer the case. Cox and TiVo have reached an agreement -- sound familiar? -- that will see allow retail CableCARD equipped TiVo Premiere DVRs to access Cox's VOD, as well as all that over the top internet video we've come to love. The SeaChange powered VOD will work similarly to RCN's, but we're waiting to see if this can give the new universal search an extra source to pull from as well. The deal also means Cox will cross promote the TiVo in its own marketing, and provide free installs for units purchased at Best Buy and other outlets including the TiVo website. The only bad news here? While TiVo plans to start testing later this year, it won't see a wide rollout (in "all major markets") until 2011. Check out the press release for all the details before calling your cable company, why should Cox customers get to choose between two different modernized, integrated set-top box platforms while the rest of us are stuck with interfaces and access rules that have been around since before the X-Games?
MovieBuddy for the iPad: a new way to look at Netflix
MovieBuddy for Netflix [US $0.99] is a new native iPad app that serves as a graphically beautiful front-end for Netflix subscribers. Billy Crystal, as Fernando on Saturday Night Live, had a catch-phrase that went: "It's better to look good than to feel good," and that's what kept going through my mind as I looked at this app. It looks great. You are presented with a beautiful velvet movie curtain that raises to show movies in your queue, or lets you browse for films by category by displaying lines of posters with a nicely rendered spotlight over each one. You swipe left to see more movies, or select See All to get a grid or CoverFlow view of all the movies in the category. When a movie is selected a box pops up allowing you to Add to Instant, Add to DVD, or Add to Blu-ray to put the movie in your queue. If the movie is available to stream, tapping on Watch Now plays the movie. Tapping on View Details brings up a lovely looking screen showing a large poster and the same information you saw before, but in a much nicer presentation. Not much new information is added outside of a slightly larger cast list. It all looks great. But how does it feel? I didn't think it felt that great at all, since for a nice display you are giving up a ton of functionality found in the free Netflix iPad app, which must be installed on your iPad anyway before MovieBuddy will work. What you don't get is the artificial intelligence engine found on the Netflix site and on its app. I was told by the developers that the categories you get IS personalized in the same way it appears on the XBox, PS3 and WII, but I don't have one of these to see. The results didn't seem personalized to me and what was displayed in the Netlix app appeared much more aligned to my individual tastes. But something is going on since every movie in every category were films I had already seen and rated. Since MovieBuddy is competing with the Netflix app, here's a list of things that the Netflix app lets you do that MovieBuddy doesn't.
Is Netflix PS3-bound, too?
Rumors of Netflix content streaming to the PS3 date back to, well, the first rumors of it hitting the Xbox 360. We all know which of those two platforms got some red envelope love last year, and now, soon after hearing the service may be heading to the Wii, we have what seems to be similar confirmation that Netflix is at least still considering bringing their bitstream to the PS3. The screenshot above was captured by a reader, showing a message like that on the earlier Wii survey -- in fact it's exactly the same from what we can see. Given our proximity to that least newsy day of the year on April 1st we can't be sure this is entirely genuine, but it probably is time for Sony to make a little room in its XMB for Netflix. [Thanks, Jake N.]
Netflix headed for the Wii?
There's a new survey from Netflix making the rounds, asking customers if they'd like to watch Netflix on the Wii. The service would apparently require a $9.99 "Netflix Instant Streaming Disc," which users could pop into the system when they wanted to watch -- far be it from Nintendo to offer a firmware update. While many of the folks we know are already getting Netflix on their Xboxen, the Wii would obviously let Netflix hit a lot more households with those Instant Watch goodies, if this ever comes to pass. As for Sony, it's still denying any plans for Netflix on the PS3, but perhaps this would help change its mind (and won't involve another $10 DVD -- we only have so many Hamiltons to go around).
