Amazon Unbox on TiVo
A few months ago, Amazon and Tivo rolled out their Unbox on Tivo. With AuoT, I can rent a movie from Amazon, have it downloaded to my TiVo so I can watch it on my TV. Amazon gave me $15 credit to try it out, so I finally gave it a go this week. I really like the idea of AuoT - select a movie from a huge collection of movies, pay a reasonable price and watch it immediately. Unlike a rental store, I don't have to make a special trip, nor do I have to worry about late fees, forgetting to put the disk back in the box, scratched/unplayable disks. And unlike Netflix, I get more immediate gratification - I don't have to try to guess what I am going to want to watch in a few days (I'm embarrassed to admit how long I had a Netflix envelope with Seven Samurai sitting on the TV waiting for me to be in the mood to watch it). Overall, the AuoT experience was Okay - I like the convenience but there are some problems:
- Selection: there are less than 2,000 movies to chose from (compared to over 80,000 at Netflix)
- Price: $3.99 is higher than I pay for most movies at the video store - while the cost for Amazon to deliver the movie must be so much less than Netflix or the local VideoMat
- Play Restrictions: Once a movie is downloaded to my TiVo, I have 2 days in which to play it - and once I start watching it I have 24 hours to finish it before it is deleted from my TiVo. That's just stupid. The rental period should be longer (3 days at least), with no restrictions or forced deletions in that period of time.
- Video Quality: The picture for the most part was very good - better than broadcast, but not as good as DVD. There were some stuttering artifacts every once in a while.
- Time to Download: It seems to take about 2 hours to download a 2 hour long movie to my TV. The annoying thing is that you can't start watching a movie until it is completely downloaded.
- No Recommendations: Uncharacteristically, Amazon offered no recommendations as to what movie I should watch - they seemed to just list movies in order of popularity.
I've been trying Unbox a bit myself as well. I don't like the fact that its limited to Windows. Since I'm using Macs, that's a drag. I was able to use it since I do run Windows through virtualization. I think it would be nice if service providers stopped restricting use of their software to a specific platform. It seems like a programming copout.
I agree with you on the time limit. From the start, it's daunting to think I must watch the movie within 2 days. That's just stupid. Once these content providers wrench away usability decisions from the suits who are over-concerned with DRM, they will see adoption of their services rise exponentially.
Posted by Brandon Carson on August 08, 2007 at 08:49 AM EDT #
Hey Paul, not sure where you got the two day limit idea from - I believe most movies are rentable for 30 days before they auto-delete? I've had Unbox movies on my Tivo for a week or two before I watched them. And I do get Unbox recommendations - there is a link right on top of the Unbox main page ...
I do agree on the price - 3.99 is not something I'd pay too often. They had a few 99 Cent rentals in the beginning, not sure if they will continue to offer things like that.
I do however like the idea of buying episodes of Showtime shows for 1.99 a buck. Just hope they will add new episodes of current seasons as soon as they air ...
Posted by Janko Roettgers on August 08, 2007 at 02:21 PM EDT #
I've been using Unbox a fair amount recently. Their office is one cube wall over, so I figure I should eat the dog food :).
I use a Mac as well, so I use the client under Boot Camp and Windows. I had a lot of problems with my first two rentals, but it has been mostly smooth sailing since then. On the PC side, you get 30 days to start watching, and then 24 hours to watch it. The 30 days is fine, but I wish I had more time to watch the movie, in case I get interrupted one night, or I want to go watch a part again to catch something I missed. I also wish they had a bigger selection, because I'm starting to run out of interesting movies :). A fair number are regularly discounted, in my experience.
Posted by Andrew Hitchcock on August 12, 2007 at 08:41 PM EDT #
Posted by いま話題の検索語とは？ on August 14, 2007 at 06:42 AM EDT #