Tivo and Amazon announced today that they have created a partnership to provide movie downloads over the network directly onto Tivo boxes. After reading the FAQ on Tivo, I'm actually excited about it. I've been waiting oh so long for something like this, especially since the Tivo / Netflix partnership never formed.
According to the Tivo FAQ, there's a one-time setup to hook up an Amazon Unbox account to a Tivo box. After that, any movie purchased can be flagged for Tivo usage. Here's the nice part: rather than downloading the movie onto your PC and streaming it over the network to the Tivo, the movies are downloaded right onto the Tivo itself. The purchase of the movie must be done on a PC, but after that, no PC is involved.
Another benefit is that Amazon will keep a library of purchased content so that movies can be deleted from the Tivo and re-downloaded at a later time. That's a step ahead of Wal-Mart's newly announced service, which only allows for one download.
Once the service is out of beta, I'll be in the front of the line to give it a shot. If the reality is anything like the description then this is a download service that I might actually use.