I had tried Amazon Unbox when it first came out and wasn’t too impressed by it. I recently went back to it a few months ago for the summer to take advantage of their weekend sales, which generally consists of 6 titles for $.99 each. A pretty good deal for current movies that can be transferred onto your laptop or Plays for Sure device. In my case it was my Windows Mobile Phone Storage card. The way Amazon does it, is that when you setup the install for the Unbox software you have the option of selecting portable device downloads and it will automatically download a “mobile version” as well as the PC version so no transcoding is done when it is transferred to your mobile player. I was disappointed to see that there was no other video player support like Zune,iPod, or PSP- maybe in the future. For now it works great with my Media Center PC and our family have enjoyed several movies via the Xbox 360 extender, which streams the 800kbps video over our home network better than live TV which occasionally has network congestion issues on our 1GB backbone go figure.
The DRM for the $.99 movies are for 30 days and you have 24hrs to watch once started. Not bad for movies you don’t want to rent or aren’t sure of purchasing and adding to your ever growing DVD collection. They also put some free downloads for season premieres a week and a half before they aired on television. The television shows and movies do take up considerable space on your hard drive about 850MB per 1 hr show and around 1.5GB-2GB per movie. We were able to see what shows were worth setting up for recording and viewing later. The fall preview is a pretty cool marketing tool. For a list of previous movies offered here are a few:
My wife and I were taking advantage of a free offer from our local cable provider aka Comcast (we have another name for it our household) in conjunction with Showtime they were offering free edited versions of Dexter Season 1 via their On Demand service to drum up customers to subscribe for Dexter Season 2. We were able to watch 10 episodes and were ready to watch the final episodes 11 and 12 when Comcast pulled the plug on the offer and ended it a few days early. We were left in a lurch and actually decided not to order Showtime because after calling customer service and received an over the phone shoulder shrug and “we can’t do anything about it, the offer just ended early”. So we were opting to either purchase the DVD of Season 1 for around $25 or spend $3.98 and download the 2 we needed off of Unbox. Since I am not one for purchasing television series on DVD unless they are really good aka Rome, Sopranos,Six Feet Under, Simpsons,etc. and I am a big fan of Heroes and Lost, but can’t see myself purchasing the season. The same was for Dexter, its good, but not good enough to view a second time. With a few clicks of the mouse we started downloading both episodes and even started viewing the first one while it was still downloading. The quality was like night and day from the Comcast free offering which looked to be a grainy ½ VGA quality image as opposed to the Unbox video which had near DVD quality and looked great on both our HD LCD TV and projection screen. Needless to say we were pleased with Unbox.
Heck we even got to see the first episode of Dexter Season 2 for free on the Internet Video offering from Media Center and may order some more Unbox when we can’t find anything else good on.
Written by Steven Hughes - Visit Website
