Amazon Unbox on Tivo

If you have a Tivo at home, like watching movies, get bored at home occasionally, or are too lazy to drive out to Blockbuster, then this post might interest you.

I read about Amazon's Unbox feature on Tivo earlier this year, but back then we didn't have a Tivo yet, so I couldn't test it out. It's a service which allows you to download movies from Amazon.com onto your Tivo box to own or to rent.

Thanks to a friend who works at Tivo and my constant nagging to Jean, we finally gave up on Dish Network and switched to Tivo HD a few months back. Oh yeah, with lifetime service too!

We finally ran out of things to do at home one day. You can only clean so much, and it was too cold to go out that night. So as I surfed on my Tivo menu, we noticed the download movie feature. They happened to have a special for $1.99 rental on a movie which Jean wanted to see for a while, "Waitress".

The setup was fairly simple, easy enough that Jean did it while I was cooking! She entered our Amazon.com account username and password onto Tivo, selected "Waitress" to rent for $1.99. Then as a final setp, we had to log onto Amazon.com to do a one time confirmation. Tivo then started the download. It took about 2 hours. But about half way through the download, it allowed us to start watching, so that was pretty cool.

When you rent a movie, you have 30 days to start watching it. And once you start, you have 24 hours to finish the movie before it is removed from your Tivo. As for selecting movies, you can do this either on your TV via Tivo or on your computer on Amazon.com's Unbox section.

Have you tried Unbox before? Let me know if there are other cool features I can try out. Now I gotta go and watch the other movie we downloaded last night for just $0.99, "Ocean Thirteen".