Amazon Unbox + Tivo vs. Netflix

Yesterday on a whim, I connected baby Tivo to Amazon’s Unbox service…the things I’ll do for $15. Unlike Tim, I haven’t purchased or rented anything, yet. While the prices are competitive (and more convenient) than purchasing DVDs it isn’t that competitive against our Netflix subscription ($15/month/rental vs. $18/month ).

I see Amazon + Tivo perfect for impulse purchases – when I can’t adjust the Netflix queue fast enough – or Target’s closed. That said, I’m not much of a impulse purchaser.

If I find something that looks interesting, I’ll let you know – at this point, Netflix wins.

Looking through Amazon’s current Unbox selection, I had a clash-of-rating-systems moment: I kept clicking the customer star rating expect it to change. It didn’t.

UPDATE: 20 March 2007
Tivo was empty last night and we’re between Netflix. Hmmmm. Seems like a great time to try out Amazon Unbox. After scouring the selection to find anything interesting – I bought the Bones pilot. Unfortunately, Unbox doesn’t stream. Simultaneously, Jen and I disappointedly exclaimed, “Aweeeeeee.”

We called it a night before hitting play. So much for impulse buys.

The Future of Hiring

“I want to see evidence of video and audio skills. I want to see evidence of familiarity with CSS, RSS, HTML and every other acronym of new media. I want people who live online, consume content on mobile devices, use social-bookmarking tools and participate in Web communities. I want people who don’t think they need some gray-haired, middle-aged man like me to give them permission to create — I want bloggers and page designers and database builders who have made things even when they weren’t getting paid.” – Paul Conley

Wednesday, March 7, 2007 11:33:43 AM

I wasn’t getting the upload speeds I was expecting. Not by a long shot. After troubleshooting the dsl line and the modem itself, the Speakeasy rep and I determined the Linksys WRT54G router was the issue. Upgrading the firmware to v4.21.1 didn’t improve anything. Then, after poking around the router’s admin settings, I found the culprit: Quality of Service (QoS) on Upstream Bandwidth was enabled. Disabling it gave me 2.5x the uploading speeds.