It’s been more than 70 years and children are still falling in love with Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey, Happy, Sneezy, Bashful and Doc from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

 

Pretty soon, classic Disney movies such as Snow White will be available to TiVo (News - Alert) customers at the touch of a button, along with newer Disney flicks such as High School Musical.

 

TiVo Inc. is announcing plans to offer subscribers the possibility of downloading Walt Disney Co. movies directly from their television sets. TiVo users will be able to rent the movies for a 24-hour period, which will be stored on the device’s broadband-connected DVR hard drive.

 

The decision to bring a new feature to its device was related to the stiff competition that TiVo is facing from the cable and satellite company DVRs. In the past few months, TiVo’s subscriber base fell 3.7 percent to 3.8 million, being its fifth-consecutive quarterly decline and also largest on a percentage basis.

 

The deal between TiVo and the online service CinemaNow will offer for rent films from all of Disney’s studios, including Pixar, and will be added to Amazon’s UnBox service, which allows users to rent movies from all of the major studios.

 

The Disney movies are scheduled to be offered sometime before the fall. The price for renting a new released video for 24 hours will be $4 and older films will be $3.

 

The first version of the TiVo digital video device was released March 31, 1999 and later, in 2000, Philips Electronics introduced their DSR6000, which was the first DirecTV (News - Alert) receiver with an integrated TiVo digital video recorder.

 

Company officials said they’re very excited to be working with Disney and CinemaNow and added that their efforts are focused on offering the best television entertainment experience and on finding new ways to offer users unlimited content and control.

 

Disney began making movies more than 70 years ago, with Snow White making its debut in 1937. They continued making, what are now classic movies, with Pinocchio in 1940, Bambi in 1942, Cinderella in 1950 and Peter Pan in 1953. They followed with Lady and the Tramp in 1955, Sleeping Beauty in 1959, 101 Dalmations in 1961 and many more.

 

Later down the road, the company struck gold with hits such as The Little Mermaid in 1989, Beauty and the Beast in 1991, Aladdin in 1992, The Lion King in 1994 and Toy Story in 1995.