TiVo at the Movies

It's not just Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) delivering digital flicks directly into your TiVo (Nasdaq: TIVO) box. This morning finds Jaman.com -- a digital distributor of indie and international films -- hopping on the TiVo bandwidth bandwagon.

Jaman's library will be available for as little as $1.99 in rental and purchase form. The site will also provide a select number of free shorts and full-length films. In the end, it's more content for Web-tethered TiVos (which are pretty much any TiVos that rely on home broadband connections instead of phone lines to update the system programming).

Jaman may not be as big a name as Amazon, but it's no slouch. Founder Gaurav Dhillon also founded and ran enterprise software specialist Informatica (Nasdaq: INFA) until 2004.

Jaman's films may be an eclectic assortment of art-house celluloid, film-fair winners, and obscure documentaries, but it's a good fit with TiVo. Keep in mind that TiVo owners typically like to be surprised with unknown programming suggestions. If they didn't, they could have probably saved some money by going for a more conventional digital video recorder. Jaman feeds that spirit.

For TiVo, it's just one more way to differentiate its box from cheaper knockoffs. TiVo has spent the past year striking content distribution deals with digital delivery specialists like Amazon and RealNetworks (Nasdaq: RNWK).

Nailing that last mile of digital delivery is important. Whether it's Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) serving up films through Xbox 360 systems or Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) updated Apple TV that will make it more seamless to push iTunes video onto your television, digital delivery of video has finally grown up.

A TiVo box is no longer merely a ticket to explore what your cable company is feeding into your home. You have a world of options. Jaman? Yeah, man.

For more content that is indie and international:

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