Testing Amazon Unbox

Leaving the house to buy movies, that is so 1990's. Renting DVD's through the mailis so early 2000's. Today it is all about legally downloading your favorite movies and television shows right to your computer. Itunes has been offering downloadable video content for almost a year now, to great success. Now online retail powerhouse Amazon is getting in on the action with its Amazon Unbox service.

Amazon Unbox allows you to either buy or rent hit movies and TV shows to your computer. The films range from about $14.99 for newer flicks to $9.99 for those less in demand. The price is on par with Itunes and about five dollars less then the price of buying the films on DVD. One of the advantages of Unbox over Itunes is the ability to rent movies for about $3.99. Once downloaded you have 30 days to watch the film, and once you start watching you have 24 hours until the file is automatically erased.

The service delivers as promised. When I tested it recently I was able to download a film in around a half-hour using a cable modem. In order to watch the movie you will need to first download the free Amazon Unbox Video Player which is, unfortunately, only available for Windows compatible PC's. The video quality is acceptable, about on quality with Itunes, but it isn't nearly as impressive as what you can get with a high quality home theater. The biggest problem with the service is that Amazon Unbox keeps you tethered to a box- your computer. You can't burn it to disk and watch it on your television. You can't transfer it to your IPod or IPhone. Unbox is compatible with a number of media players but until it is compatible with Apple's products it will be useless to a large portion of the market.