Amazon Unbox - The future of home entertainment?
After I got home from work tonight, my wife suggested we watch a movie. Drive to Hollywood Video and pickup a DVD? How old-school! Open one of those stale Netflix envelopes? How 1999.
Two days ago, Amazon announced their Unbox service available via TiVo. I gave it a whirl.
How was the experience? First up - you have login to Amazon Unbox and give them your TiVo account information. Then you simply pick your movie and purchase. The website tells you that your movie is being 'downloaded'. Not believing it could be so easy I rushed upstairs to take a look at my TiVo. A few minutes later, and the movie appeared on my list. I wasn't able to play it until it was fully downloaded but it came down at a fairly fast rate - in about 45 minutes - we had the movie ready to watch.
This is one of those pivotal home technology points for our household. The first was getting a TiVo, the second was getting my music all over with Sonos, the third was being able to listen to any music I want with Rhapsody over Sonos. The notion of recent movies on-demand to my TiVo is killer - my wife is incredibly excited about the prospect - and she doesn't get excited about new technologies easily.
The future is bright, and while Unbox has it's host of imperfections (selection & cost being my top two), six months from now, I have no doubt that rather than flicking on TiVo and watching pre-recorded broadcast tv - we'll be picking from favorite new release movies or watching amusing YouTube snippets recommended by friends.
Is the "digital home" really here?
-Brett
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Brett Marl
CTO, Pure Networks
www.networkmagic.com
Comments
I tried Unbox to TiVo this weekend as well. Overall I thought it was great. I had one issue - after I rented the movie from Amazon it never came down to my TiVo. The next day I went into my Amazon account and reinitiated the download and it worked no problem that time. The picture quality of the movie I thought was very good. The only thing it had trouble with was very dark scenes - the black background got a pixelated look. But I am elated about this service - I have always wanted something like this. We like pay-per-view movies but the selection on Comcast is poor and the user interface horrendous. I think the prices of Unbox are very reasonable - $3.99 to rent a movie is what I pay to Hollywood Video.
Posted by: markk | March 11, 2007 09:41 PM
I used your product as well as others like it. I found it user friendly and it maped my network including the wireless part easily. It did what it was desinged for with no problem. However I also need a desktop session application, and for that I used VNC. It's to bad(maybe something to think about) that they wer'nt combined. Thanks alot for the great program,
Posted by: ross | March 11, 2007 01:57 PM