’net flicks

PVRBlog notes that the upcoming Newsweek will report on a new partnership between Netflix and TiVo to offer downloadable movies to network-connected TiVo Series 2. I’m flipping out over this news, because this is the kind of application I’d hoped TiVo would get into when they had first offered the Home Media package and made the Series 2 boxes Internet-enabled—and when I finally bought into both items.

Granted, I thought it was going to be more along the lines of internet content, such as video or Flash streams from partner sites, but that would have been a first-year solution. It seems like they skipped doing something as simple as that to focus on the big deals, such as this announcement, and the upcoming TiVo-to-Go add-on, where you can copy locked versions of the files (it will encrypt the video files to a key stored on a specialized hardware device—a dongle, as it is called—that must be connected to the computer in question for it to play) on the TiVo onto a computer on your local network for later viewing, such as watching a set of episodes on your laptop during a flight.

As both a TiVo and Netflix user, I say “hurry up already!”