Tuesday, February 14

Oh God, Another Set-Top Box!

Move over Netflix, having to walk to your mailbox for movies is so 2005. A Disney subsidiary called MovieBeam can send you up to 10 movies weekly by piggybacking on over-the-air TV signals from your local PBS broadcaster.* It stores up to 100 titles for later playback. The only cost is $200 for the box, plus the "rental" fee for watching a downloaded movie. (Yay, no subscription fees!) The kicker is that some titles are available in high-def, beating those confusing HD-DVD players to the U.S. market by months. Considering this is really just a variation on the whole TiVo theme, I'd like to know when this same technology will be coming to the boxes already in our living rooms. (After all, I'm running out of HD inputs to my TV set.)

* Available now in DC. Sacramento maybe later?