TiVo To Add Jaman Video Downloads

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jaman.pngMari’s favorite independent & foreign film download service is hooking up with TiVo… Later this year, Jaman will join Amazon Unbox on TiVo in bringing digital movie rentals to the TV.

“By capitalizing on TiVo’s vast big-screen user experience, we’re making it even easier for people to discover, browse and enjoy our catalog of high definition, edgy and award-winning films on their TVs,” said Jaman’s CEO Gaurav Dhillon. “This venture cements our position as a leading online provider of movies, offering unique and original content that viewers can’t find anywhere else.”

This is a good move for both companies – Netflix seems to have proven (and banked on) the value of long-tail content, the sort that Jaman provides. However, TiVo’s challenge continues to be marketing the benefits of their box and service over the competition. And I’d like Unbox in HD.

8 thoughts on “TiVo To Add Jaman Video Downloads”

  1. Nice. Bollywood and Hong Kong cinema come to TiVo (“Shaolin Prince”!).

    The big thing with the marketing is that I only see TiVo heavily marketing to its installed base. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t need to see TiVo ads in my Showcase when I’m already running two TiVo boxes in my house. They really need to find a way to market in a way that grows the userbase, and that means bringing the price of entry down (c’mon guys: $199 TiVo HD!) and aggressively marketing.

  2. The thing that get’s me the most excited is “high definition”. Hopefully it’ll lead to more HD content on Amazon Unbox.

  3. I think Dave has nailed the issue that TiVo has a problem with – marketing. Marketing is expensive, and for a company trying to move into the black it’s hard to see the returns over costs. I know so many people who just don’t understand how different a TiVo is from a cable or dish dvr’s. It would probably take a Super Bowl buy of several commercials to really educate the public, but I doubt TiVo has the marketing budget to do that. As a big TiVo fan, I’m hoping they figure out how to do it.

  4. As Apple found over the years, selling a superior interface works, but it results in a very small market share. An expanding DVR market will help Tivo, but is it enough?

    This looks like a nice service, but I’d rather be able to have my Tivo 1) act as a decent music server and 2) play H.264 files from my computer’s HD.

  5. Charlie,

    Doesn’t Desktop 2.5 allow transfers of h.264 files already? I thought I remember hearing about that.

    As for music server, what are you looking for? Right now it can stream MP3 files (unprotected) straight from a networked computer. You can also listen to Live365 radio stations and download music videos from Music Choice.

  7. There are third party (free) add ons that will convert various audio formats on the fly. You have to do some configuring on your PC, but I listen to FLAC format files on my (unhacked) Series 2 Tivos.

    As for video, pyTivo may support H.264. I haven’t tried that particular format, but it supports everything that I have thrown at it (avi, xvid, mp4, etc). It handles PAL-> NTSC conversion, too.

    Of course it would be nice if these extended features came standard from Tivo, instead of from third parties, but at least there is a way to do it.

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