Amazon Unbox And TiVo Provide A Geek His BSG Fix

Posted on Monday, April 7, 2008 by MegaZone

Jeff Haywood of The Grand Rapids Press blogged about a different way to use Amazon Unbox on TiVo – as an alternative to subscribing to a higher tier of cable. Jeff and his wife are big Battlestar Galactica fans (and who can blame them?), which returned for its fourth, and final, season on Friday night. But Jeff doesn’t watch enough content to justify the $20/month additional cost for the Comcast tier that includes The SciFi Channel. So what to do? Jeff’s solution is to purchase the season of BSG from Amazon Unbox:

A day after a new episode is aired, it is automatically downloaded to my TiVo via the Internet for $1.89 an episode. The quality is great, and price is cheaper than subscribing for digital cable for the length of the final season.

Have any of you used Unbox as an alternative to a cable, or satellite, subscription? I wonder how common this is.

About MegaZone

MegaZone is the Editor of Gizmo Lovers and the chief contributor. He's been online since 1989 and active in several generations of 'social media' - mailing lists, USENet groups, web forums, and since 2003, blogging.    MegaZone has a presence on several social platforms: Google+ / Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn / LiveJournal / Web.    You can also follow Gizmo Lovers on other sites: Blog / Google+ / Facebook / Twitter.
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  • http://www.zeigen.com/blog/ Stephen Mack

    Happened to see this blog post along the same lines:
    http://makeyournut.com/?p=177

  • Glenn

    Can’t comment on using it to avoid higher cable fees, but as a recent convert to BSG I watched the first two seasons via Unbox on Tivo and was perfectly happy. For the third season though I bought the DVD and ripped it, then dropped copies in the Tivo directory and let Tivo Desktop do the job. This was quite a bit more work on my part, ripping each of 5 DVDs, naming the episodes, copying large files around, but the resulting copies were certainly better looking than the Unbox versions, and 16:9 as well of course. For something like BSG I think this is important, though obviously you get the idea even without the pictures being quite so pretty. Actually, now that I’m used to watching it this way I find having to watch the current shows in 4:3 off my local Comcasts non-HD SciFi feed frustrating, especially with the commercials. From now on I’ll catch up on the occasional show I missed off hulu or SciFi.com, using a flash ripper like Replay Media Catcher when the internet connection in the hotel room is a little slow…

  • Rob Maass

    I actually recommended this to my sister. She has a Tivo Series 2,and wanted to reduce her cable bill. Her thought was to buy Apple TV or VUDO to get shows off the net. I told her, if she wants to do that, just use Amazon unbox and her Tivo. I dont’ know which direction she went ultimately. But she sure liked the idea.