TiVo offers American indie and international films through Jaman partnership

jamanGive TiVo points for continuing to improve its service for subscribers, and while you’re at it throw in a clove cigarette or two.

TiVo has struck a deal with Jaman, the peer-to-peer Web movie service, to bring its catalogue of American indie and international films directly to its set-top box. Think Oscar-nominated “Paheli”, “Loverboy” (Sundance), “All About Lily Chou-Chou” (Berlin International Film Festival), and “La Promesse” (Cannes) — movies that you’d have a hard time finding anywhere else. Ah, subtitled films.

tivo beretRentals start at $1.99 but some movies and shorts will be available for free. TiVo expands Jaman’s reach to set-top boxes; it already is available for PCs, Macs, SanDisk’s TakeTV, and DivX.

It’s a good partnership for TiVo. Jaman supplements the mainly Hollywood fare TiVo gets from its relationship with Amazon Unbox, so movie fans get the best of the indie and mainstream film worlds.

It’s not a game-changing partnership, but it does allow TiVo to compete against Apple’s new iTunes rental service (with content from all the leading film studios) and updated set-top box, AppleTV Take Two. Ironically, Jaman originally hacked the first AppleTV.

It remains a shame that the AppleTV still remains under the lock and key of Apple. It’d be great for AppleTV owners to have access to third party developers and Web services such as Jaman.

Funny illustration credit of TiVo wearing a French beret goes to: Gizmodo.

last100 is edited by Steve O'Hear. Aside from founding last100, Steve is co-founder and CEO of Beepl and a freelance journalist who has written for numerous publications, including TechCrunch, The Guardian, ZDNet, ReadWriteWeb and Macworld, and also wrote and directed the Silicon Valley documentary, In Search of the Valley. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

Leave a Reply