This week Amazon VOD is offering three $0.99 rentals: The Incredible Hulk, Get Smart, and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2.
They’re also offering discounted purchases on a number of titles. Fourteen titles for $4.99 and eight titles for $5.99. They’re also offering ten complete television seasons for $14.99 each: The Office Seasons 2 & 3, Monk Seasons 2, 3, 4, & 5, Friday Night Lights Seasons 1 & 2, and House Seasons 1 & 2. And there are a number of free downloads.
The good news, if you buy an unlocked Nokia N96 smartphone from Amazon through December 31, 2008 you not only save 47% off MSRP, but you’re eligible for $9.95 worth of free downloads from Amazon Video On Demand. The N96 is quite an impressive phone – Symbian S60 OS, 2.8-inch 320×240 screen, quad band GSM (850/900/1800/1900), dual-band 3G HSDPA (850/1900), WiFi, A-GPS, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss Optics (which can also capture 640×480 video), a second VGA camera on the front for use in video calls, 16GB on-board storage with a microSDHC slot for expansion, FM radio, N-Gage application support for games, and more. This is truly a loaded phone.
And now the bad news. Sure, you save 47%, but that’s 47% off the $1200 MSRP! Yes, one thousand two hundred dollars. You pay $639.99. For a phone. OK, sure, it is an uber-device that can replace your phone, camera, PMP, and perhaps more. But that’s still not impulse buy territory.
Right now at Amazon you can save $100 on the Samsung BD-P1500 and BD-2500 Blu-ray players.
That means that the Profile 2.0 / BD-Live BD-P1500 is only $199.99, a fantastic deal on a full featured player. And that’s not all, if you’re also in the market for an HDTV you can buy one of ten Samsung HDTVs and this player and save $200 – you get the player free. Very nice.
Alternatively, the Profile 2.0 / BD-Live BD-P2500 is $299. What do you get for the extra $100? Internal Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD decoding (both models can bitstream) and 7.1 audio analog outputs (the BD-P1500 has only 2.0 analog outputs). Not a big deal if you have an A/V receiver with decoders, since the BD-P1500 can bitstream the formats over HDMI, which is more convenient anyway.
But that’s not all, the BD-P2500 is also one of the Netflix streaming Blu-ray players. And it not only streams Netflix video, but it will soon support Netflix’s new HD streaming video. Since the dedicated Roku Netflix player is $99, for the price of a BD-P1500 and a Roku box you get all of the functionality in one box.
Buy.com’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sale Event starts today. Look for price drops on a number of products.
There was a fun article in Wednesday’s New York Times, in the Freakonomics Blog – TiVo Economics. In it economist Justin Wolfers looks at TiVo (and by extension, DVRs in general) from an economic standpoint. The value of the time saved skipping ads, the value of improved entertainment from selective content, etc, and shows that in the end TiVo makes sense, and cents. This captures the crux of the article:
Average hourly earnings are around $18, suggesting that TiVo saves time that could otherwise have been sold for around $108 per week. We should also add in the benefit of higher quality television — around $11 per week — and subtract the cost of the annoying service charge, which is around $3 per week, yielding net benefits of $116 per week, or $6,000 per year. The net present value of this flow is around $120,000 per person, or perhaps around a quarter of a million dollars per household. Wow.
The value would be even higher over time with a lifetime subscription instead of monthly I’d think – though I’m no economist. It is a light-hearted piece, but he is making a serious point about the value of time and entertainment, and how TiVo can maximize that value for you. Read the full article for a break down of his math and the assumptions he bases it on.
