Oct
1
unwrapping Unbox
Filed under technical, movies, tv at 10:19 pm | Leave a Comment
Amazon has a service called Unbox, which gives you the ability to purchase or rent TV shows and movies in a downloadable format (e.g., on a computer). Earlier this spring they partnered with TiVo to allow the downloading of those purchases directly to your TiVo unit. They offered a $15 credit to everyone that registered their TiVo by a certain date, so I gave it a try.
We’ve used it close to a dozen times, both for TV shows and movies. Here are my thoughts on the service so far:
- All in all, I’m really impressed, and am enjoying the service, mostly because of its convenience and ease of use. I can browse Amazon’s site, use their 1 click purchase to buy or rent the movie or show, and within a couple minutes it’s already downloading to my TiVo.
- More recently, they’ve added the ability to browse and purchase from Unbox directly through the TiVo. It’s a slimmed down version of what’s online, but that’s probably necessary to make the interface usable on the TV with a remote.
- For some reason, closed captioning is not available with any of the downloads. There have been a couple movies where the audio didn’t seem quite balanced (voices are soft, but music and sound effects are loud), and closed captioning would have been nice.
- Unfortunately you have to wait until the movie or TV show is completely downloaded to your TiVo before you can begin watching. I wish you could begin watching once a sufficient amount had been buffered, but knowing that ahead of time it’s easy enough to plan ahead.
- Download speeds have been about real time (e.g., 2 hours for a 2 hour movie), from what I’ve seen. That’s acceptable to me, given the fact my TiVo is connected to our home network wirelessly.
- Once the movie or TV show has downloaded, you have 30 days to watch it before it’s automatically deleted. However, once you start playing it, you then have only 24 hours before it’s deleted. During that 24 hour period, you can treat it like any other show you’ve recorded, watching it as many times as you want, fast-forwarding, rewinding, etc. I can live with these DRM measures, but I would like to see something like 36 hours rather than 24. Frequently we start a movie one night (after the little guy’s in bed), and don’t quite finish it. The next available time to watch the rest is the following evening, starting at the same time. With only 24 hours, that’s too late to go back to it. If the window were bumped out to 36 hours, that would allow two evenings to get it all in, while still making the DRM folks happy.
Even though we’ve used up all of our $15 credit, we continue using the service. On weekends they always have a handful of new movies for $0.99, and with the TV season ramping up, they’ve been offering series pilots from NBC and FOX for free– even before they’ve aired. I’ll admit that’s the first time I remember ever watching the pilot for a show, and wouldn’t be surprised if we give one of the shows a try this season.
If you’ve got a real TiVo (not those DirecTV look-a-likes), I recommend trying out the Unbox service. I’ve certainly gotten good use of it so far.