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TiVo DVR owners will soon be able to watch movies and TV shows purchased or rented from Amazon's Unbox video download service. The new feature, being beta tested by a "select group of TiVo subscribers" according to TiVo's press release, will eventually be rolled out to more than 1.5 million TiVo Series2 and Series3 owners.

According to the FAQ page on Amazon, you'll choose the videos you want to download while browsing Amazon's site on your PC, but the videos will be downloaded directly to the TiVo. Once they're fully downloaded, they'… Read more

Netflix has fleshed out some details of its newly announced movie download service. The Watch Now instant viewing service is scheduled to become available to all Netflix subscribers by June. It will launch with just 1,000 titles (movies and TV shows), but the selection will expand thereafter--slowly but surely--to encompass as many of the 70,000-plus titles in the Netflix database as possible. The online viewing feature will be a free addition to existing accounts, with subscribers getting a monthly allotment of online viewing time based on their subscription level. For instance, an $18-per-month plan (three DVDs out at … Read more

A few weeks ago, I noticed my local (Brooklyn, N.Y.) Blockbuster Video store was closing up shop. No big deal. These things happen all the time, especially with the sky-high rents charged for commercial real estate here in New York City. But when I saw that two other nearby Blockbusters were also shutting down, my interest was piqued. Some quick googling revealed that the closures weren't limited to Manhattan and Brooklyn: at least 16 stores in northern Michigan were also shuttered in recent months. And who knows how many were closing without the news hitting the local papers. … Read more