Over the weekend I noticed Amazon.com announced that their Unbox video download service now supports download to Tivo. To entice people to try it they're offering a $15 credit towards purchase or rental, so it didn't take much convincing for us to see what was on offer and give a movie rental a try. Most rentals are $3.99, which allows you to download the movie to your Tivo and keep it there for up to 30 days. As soon as you start watching it, you've got 24 hours before the Tivo automatically deletes it. Both the cost and the viewing period are the same as what our cable company offers through their On Demand service, so this is a nice alternative to have. It certainly beats the extortionate bricks-and-mortar video rental rates in our area.

The selection isn't huge right now, and not all movies or shows are available for download to Tivo, but there were a few movies in the list that sounded interesting. I picked The Illusionist for our first free rental, and with one click it was on its way. The download started after 15 minutes and took about 1.5 hours to download the whole movie through our 6Mbit cable connection. For reference I think the movie was nearly 2 hours long. In theory it'd be possible to watch it as it downloads on a fast-enough connection, but that option wasn't offered.

The video quality is on par with DVD, although I did notice an annoying shimmering whenever there was a long panning shot or fast motion. We don't see any such problems with our cable's On Demand service. It looks like Amazon needs to finetune their video encoding.

The Unbox service is probably not cost effective for frequent renters, so you're probably better off with something like Netflix if you're in that category. I'm also not convinced that purchasing movies through the service is such a good deal when you can get them on DVD for a similar price. What I'd really like to see is Netflix hopping on the bandwagon and allowing download to Tivo too. From what I recall they were just getting started with video downloads to PCs, so a deal with Tivo probably isn't far away.

The movie itself was good, although not as engrossing as The Prestige which we also watched this weekend. Incidently we really liked The Prestige. If you haven't seen it already, do so! ;)

Has anyone read either the original novel The Prestige was based on, or the short story that inspired The Illusionist? According to the ISFDB, The Prestige won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1996 and The Illusionist won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in 1990. I'd be interested to know how closely the movies follow the original source material.