That Blockbuster plans to bring its On Demand service to TiVo is news enough — the Netflix rival certainly needs to shift its streaming movie service onto more devices than the proprietary MediaPoint player you currently need in order to use it.
In fact, this news should tickle TiVo owners, whose box is fast becoming the best single way to watch movies instantly via the internet. But the news that is catching everybody’s attention is a small fact that Blockbuster senior VP Kevin Lewis let slip when talking to Reuters — Blockbuster will stream content to “Apple devices". Sadly, Reuters didn’t quote directly, so we don’t know which devices exactly, only that they will be “the normal places that consumers want to watch movies."
This could just mean a Mac client, something it took Netflix a while to get around to. Or it could mean iPhone or Apple TV. Or it could mean absolutely nothing. Remember Adobe’s increasingly desperate bleats that it is bringing Flash to the iPhone, and that “Apple and Adobe are collaborating"? This “collaboration" was in fact wishful thinking on the part of Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayan.
Could it be that this is merely a Freudian Slip on the part of Lewis? That his desire to be on the iWagon is so great that it bubbled up from Blockbuster’s collective unconscious and spilled out all over the TiVo announcement? We don’t know, but if company philosophy is any indicator, we’d put money on a Netflix/AppleTV double-team instead.
What we do know is the the whole TiVo lineup will be able to use the Blockbuster service in the second half of the year. There will be 10,000 titles to choose from. Prices are yet to be confirmed, but they are likely to be similar to today’s Blockbuster.com prices, at $2-$4 for rentals and $10+ for purchases. The biggest shock, though is this quote from Lewis: “You have to think about what the consumer wants." Yes, he really said that.
Blockbuster aims beyond stores with TiVo deal [Reuters]
