By Alan Breznick
 
     Want to rent a film without trekking to the local video store? Blockbuster, the largest renter of videos in the world, thinks it’s found just the way to do it.
    Facing a potential threat to its huge home-video rental business, Blockbuster plans to team with TiVo to serve up selected movies to couch potatoes through a new breed of digital VCRs. Folks buying the TiVo personal video recorder (PVR) machines would be able to rent the movies from Blockbuster by pressing a button or two on their remote control pads.
   In an intriguing alliance of new and old media that went virtually unnoticed last week in the hysteria over the proposed merger between America Online and Time Warner, TiVo and Blockbuster aim to develop the video-on-demand (VOD) type of service by the end of the year. The yet-to-be named service, which would likely carry both the TiVo and Blockbuster brands, would start by offering five to 10 movies to TiVo customers at any particular time. Viewers would rent the movies on a pay-per-view basis, with TiVo and Blockbuster likely splitting the proceeds.
    "The movies would be continually changed," says Randy Hargrove, director of corporate communications for Blockbuster, a unit of Viacom. "You could watch one for a day or reserve one for a week."
    The pay-per-view service, tentatively dubbed "virtual VOD," would work by automatically downloading and recording films from Blockbuster on the computer hard-drive of the TiVo subscriber’s digital set-top box. Viewers could then select the film they want to see and order it with their remote. But they wouldn’t be able to store the film on videotape for return viewings.
   In a world of dozens of releases a month, a choice of five to 10 movies at a time may not sound like all that much. If it were a true VOD service, scores, or even hundreds, of titles would be available simultaneously.
   But Hargrove says the selection would be customized to customers’ tastes, based on their preferences and their history of renting films at Blockbuster. So the five to 10 films made available would presumably be the ones that people really want to see.
   More significantly, movie fans could finally rent a film from Blockbuster without ever entering one of its 6,900 stores again. Although the pricing has not been set yet, the two partners would likely impose a fee pretty close to the video rental charges at Blockbuster outlets now.
   "It would probably be a per-movie charge similar to Blockbuster’s current model," says Rebecca Baer, a corporate spokeswoman for TiVo, one of two Silicon Valley startups developing digital PVRs. Both TiVo and its chief rival, Replay Networks, have just started marketing their new machines aggressively in stores and online.
    Besides peddling the rental films to TiVo customers, Blockbuster may also bombard them with movie previews, trailers and promotional offers, under the agreement reached by the two companies 10 days ago. In addition, Blockbuster may let TiVo subscribers reserve movies for eventual pickup at Blockbuster stores or later viewing through their PVRs.
    For its part, TiVo could promote special offers on its boxes and services to Blockbuster’s 65 million card-carrying members worldwide. TiVo would also get signs, demonstration kiosks and other promotional opportunities in Blockbuster’s nearly 4,000 stores in the U.S.

-Alan Breznick covers cable and technology from Washington.