First announced in May, and reported last week to be launching soon, Disney content is now available for download on TiVo! Simply navigate to TiVo Central -> Find Programs & Downloads -> Download TV, Movies, & Web Video, and you should see a new item in the menu - Walt Disney Studios. Within Walt Disney Studios you can select from Most Popular, New Arrivals, Browse Walt Disney Studios, and About CinemaNow.

The latter is due to this offering being brought to TiVo through a partnership with CinemaNow, which has digital distribution rights to Disney content. While the offering is currently limited to Disney films, the CinemaNow TiVo page has a FAQ which states:

For now only Walt Disney® Studios rental movies can be watched on your TiVo DVR.
Stay tuned as we are working to add more selections soon.

If you are browsing the CinemaNow website, look for the ‘Plays On TiVo’ logo on the title detail page to ensure this video can play on TiVo DVR.

And back when it was first announced I did check with TiVo and was told it would include non-Disney content from CinemaNow. So we can look forward to expanded content offerings going forward. The current offering features a selection of over 100 Walt Disney Studio titles, including both animated classics like Dumbo and modern blockbusters like Jet Li’s Hero.

This service is available on the TiVo Series2, TiVo Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL. The current offering is all SD, but hopefully we’ll see HD content added. You can get more information from TiVo’s CinemaNow/Disney page.

TiVo announced a deal to bring Disney content downloads to their boxes, via CinemaNow, back in May, and a similar deal with Jaman all the way back in January. But little had been said about the deals since the announcements, until now.

Jaman.com content should become available on broadband connected TiVo boxes starting today. Similar to Amazon Video On Demand, Jaman content will be available for purchase or rent with prices starting at $1.99. Jaman’s library contains internationally-acclaimed films, including Indie and Film Festival Favorites, Best of Bollywood and Documentaries. Titles include Oscar nominees Girl with a Pearl Earring, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and Supersize Me, as well as independent gems like Oil and Ice, Bollywood greats Devdas and Chokher Bali and anime landmarks Ghost in the Shell and Robotech. Jaman will also offer some content for download free of charge.

Disney content, provided through CinemaNow, will be available sometime next week. Disney content will be available for rental with prices starting at $2.99. Both classic favorites such as Dumbo and Fox & The Hound and newer films like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest will be available.

And while the focus of the deal has been Disney content, which is not available through Amazon VOD, it does include CinemaNow content in general. So this will give users a great deal more content to choose from.

Both should show up under Find Programs & Downloads -> Download TV, Movies, & Web Video. The content, as with Amazon VOD, will be in standard definition. However, TiVo is working to add high-definition downloads to the TiVo Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL.

I can’t wait for the HD downloading option. I also hope that TiVo is working on streaming options, now that they have streaming in place for YouTube. I’d like to see streaming from Amazon VOD, and then Netflix, Hulu, and other sites. That would make TiVo the box to have for online content.

Another Blu-ray sale at Amazon, this time save 40% on six Disney titles: Cars, Ratatouille, Pixar Short Films Collection: Volume 1, Meet the Robinsons, Dinosaur, and Chicken Little.

Picked up from Blu-ray Stats News Log.

I enjoy watching John C. Dvorak on Cranky Geeks, which is available via TiVoCast, in part because he’ll sometimes make fairly outrageous predictions or bold statements. This time, starting with the recent announcement of TiVo making a deal to present Disney content via download, he’s suggesting that Disney should purchase TiVo.

TiVo is sitting in the sweet spot. And when I see a company like Disney playing around with a company like TiVo I begin to wonder if Disney is getting its feet wet in advance of a buyout deal. With a market cap just under a billion it might be too much to swallow, but it would give Disney a technology it could use and leverage.

I think he’s over-reaching just a wee bit. Sure, TiVo has made a deal with Disney to bring their content to TiVo downloads, and that’s a significant deal for what it is. But the deal is really through CinemaNow, the Disney content is just the major marque name involved, and the only major studio TiVo didn’t already have via Amazon Unbox. Disney’s content is also available via Apple’s iTunes and Apple TV - is Disney going to buy Apple? Steve Jobs already has a foot in both camps. TiVo has deals with Amazon, Jaman. YouTube, Rhapsody, Music Choice, etc. CinemaNow is just another content partner, I think John is reading too much into the deal.

I don’t see where it makes sense for Disney to buy TiVo. They’re a big brand name, with built-in demand. They’re better off doing deals like this one, and the Apple deal, to bring their content to more platforms, and therefore into more homes. They don’t need to own a hardware company to do that.

TiVo continues to add content partners as they continue to transform the TiVo from a DVR into a general content portal. Joining the existing TiVoCast, TiVo Web Video, and Amazon Unbox content, and the previously announced Jaman and YouTube features, is CinemaNow. While the press release (below) really stressed the fact that Walt Disney Studios content is part of the deal, I did ask and had confirmed that the deal includes other content from CinemaNow and not just Disney.

Unfortunately, rentals are subject to the same 24 hour viewing window as Unbox. This is just the industry standard, and until the studios relax their requirements we’re stuck with it. Even 48 hours would be a nice improvement. But this is a nice but of news:

The companies will offer the movies for a 24-hour rental period in standard definition, with many also available in high definition.

We could really use more high definition content downloads. This will be a nice addition to TiVo’s content sources, and we’ve already had a hint at HD content coming to Unbox and it sounds like the Jaman content will be HD.

I hope we continue to see content sources added to TiVo, perhaps Netflix or Blockbuster’s Movielink will be next. Variety and competition are both good things.

The press release:
Read the rest of this entry »

Sound and Vision Magazine talked to Pixar’s John Lasseter about the feature-packed Blu-ray release of the Disney/Pixar film Cars. Lasseter is very much pro-Blu-ray and he comes across as being excited as a film maker with the format’s potential.

Similarly, when Lasseter heard about Blu-ray, he immediately started thinking of all the ways he could use it to enhance the experience of Pixar’s films. “I went to Bob Chapek over at Disney Home Entertainment, and said, ‘Teach me, teach me, teach me about what you can do with Blu-ray that you can’t do with DVD!’ There were two main things I got excited about. One was the new ways to do commentary, which I love. As a filmmaker, the commentary is the one true document of the making of the film, because everything’s fresh in your mind. Ten years later, I forget the stories of the little details of making Toy Story. But at the time, you know it. And the second thing is, a Blu-ray player is like a little computer, so there’s so much more you can do.

“I love making the movies for the theater, but I also love making them to be seen at home. With Blu-ray, all the high-definition and the amazing sound helps bring out the details — and we really, really stress the details. The amount of data this format can handle lets us go so much deeper into the story — the characters and their world — but also lets us talk about the filmmaking.”

Lasseter was behind the effort to make Cars an example of what Blu-ray can do, with the Car Finder Game and the Cine-Explore interface for commentary, etc.

For Lasseter, Blu-ray is clearly not a gimmick or a marketing tool, but a new, and pretty much untested, creative vehicle he can’t wait to take out on the road again to see where else it takes him. “We’ve been working on this version of Cars for well over a year — since even before the movie was finished — looking ahead to when Blu-ray would come out. We knew we wanted to create this, so we were really excited, but we wanted to wait until the technology settled down. As we get used to what we can and can’t do with Blu-ray, it’s the same thing as with computer animation: It gives us more ideas. I always say that art challenges technology, and technology inspires the art. With this disc, the art was challenging the technology. The more we get to know about Blu-ray, it’s going to inspire us to do great things that we can’t even think of right now.”

Read the full article for a lot more. I’m certainly interested in what Lasseter will come up with for future Pixar Blu-ray releases.