Review of Amazon.com's Unbox Feature

Amazon.com's new Unbox feature certainly seems intriguing to movie fans--the service is an easy way to download and watch movies on your computer or Tivo, with hundreds of available titles in nearly every conceivable genre.

I grabbed a few flicks off of Unbox, in both formats, to see how they stack up to similar service such as Vongo or iTunes.

Computer-Based

Amazon's Unbox is fairly easy to use from your own user account; you simply find the movie you want in their Unbox store, select whether you want to watch it once or "own" it (quotations because there's some digital rights management involved--forget burning these flicks to a DVD), select your device (computer, Tivo, etc.) and pay. Once your film's downloaded, you'll have a set amount of time to watch it once you press play for the first time if you've rented it. If you bought it, watch it to your heart's content.

Movies download quickly and the selection is pretty awesome. Amazon's constantly expanding their library and have something for every taste, including a good number of major movies and recent releases. Prices are a couple of bucks for rentals, and more for, er, "ownership."

TiVo

I appreciate the ability to beam movies to my Tivo and watch them on my home television set, but Amazon and Tivo could really get their act together a lot better in their presentation.

The biggest issue I experienced was a problem with space on the Tivo's hard drive--which makes sense, since movie files are so large. I wouldn't assume that I could keep my normal Tivo quota of 56 episodes of Home Improvement AND download movies at the same time, but why do I have to manually clear out my queue for the next several days of recording in order to even begin downloading my movies? There should at least be an error message on the Tivo's display when the device's hard drive isn't able to download an Amazon Unbox movie due to lack of space. And speaking of this lack of space, it's silly to even offer an "ownership" option for Tivo users--one movie would take up a huge amount of the Tivo's space, rendering it useless to its basic function.

The other problem was the transfer rate, a problem that network-connected Tivo users are undoubtedly aware of. My Series 2 TiVo took pretty much all day to download Idiocracy
off of Unbox. In comparison, my Xbox 360 downloaded The Descent in only an hour or two--in HD.

These issues are more on the Tivo side than the Amazon side, but a bit of cooperation to get them resolved would go a long way towards making the service more user-friendly.

Overall, I was pretty pleased with Amazon's Unbox--there are a few video downloading services out there, but none really have the selection of Amazon (except for maybe Apple's iTunes), and if they can work out the kinks with the Tivo service, they stand a real chance of spreading video downloading technology to the masses.