I
f you’re like us, you’ve bought a lot of
traditional media, be it DVDs, CDs, or—
gasp!—books, from Amazon.com over
the years yet have downloaded little or no
content from its digital stores. After spend-
ing some time with Unbox—Amazon’s
relatively new movie and TV download
service—we’re about ready to start using
it regularly. With a broad selection of inex-
pensive content and an easy and cheap
way to get Unbox content to your living
room, we initially thought this would be the
service to beat—despite a complete lack
of HD content.
Rental prices range from $3 to $4; pur-
chases range from less than $10 to around
$15. As with the other services, we wouldn’t
recommend purchasing downloadable
movies—given the usage restrictions—but
Amazon does make some allowances to fair
use: Your purchase lets you download a TiVo-
friendly fi le, a PC-friendly fi le, and a fi le that’s
optimized for PlaysForSure portable players.
If you’re browsing the web interface, there’s
even a handy chart on every page that tells
you the aspect ratio, audio format, and fi le
size for each of the different formats. We’d
rather just buy an unencumbered DVD, but
this is among the most consumer-friendlyservices we tested.
Unbox’s PC software is unremarkable and
a little buggy. It handles the fi le downloads and
playback for both PCs and mobile devices.
As with all the other services we examined, it
operates on a progressive-download model
that enables you to begin watching the movie
while the download is in progress (as soon as
it grabs enough data to fi ll its buffer). Unbox’s
integration with TiVo, however, sets it apart
from the competition. Using any network-
connected Series2 or Series3 TiVo (Series
boxes can be found for around $100), you can
watch rented or purchased movies on your
big-screen TV. (But you’ll have to wait for the
entire fi le to be downloaded fi rst; progressive
download isn’t available on the TiVo.)You can also purchase content directly
from your TiVo using the remote. The TiVo
ordering interface isn’t bad, but we prefer the
extra information Amazon provides through
the web browser. Once you make your pur-
chase, you can choose to start downloading
to your PC or send the fi le to your TiVo. We’d
like to see support for high-defi nition con-
tent, but Amazon needs to switch to a more
effi cient codec before that will work—even
standard-def movies are larger than 2GB.
The content library is impressive, with
good coverage in new releases as well as
a decent number of classic titles and cult
classics; the price is right, too. We’re fond
of Unbox, but it’s certainly not perfect. The
service uses WMV, which leaves a lot to be
desired in the image-quality department. The
video we downloaded was decent but a bit
soft, similar to that of the other WMV-powered
services we tested and clearly inferior to the
quality of video we downloaded from the
iTunes Store, which was itself inferior to DVDs.
Still, we wouldn’t say the video quality
from Unbox was unacceptable, and combined
with its easy method for getting content to the
living room, support for portable devices, and
reasonable pricing, we believe this is a fairly
compelling service. The only thing missing is
high-defi nition content using a better codec,
which would make Unbox the clear winner
here. We won’t buy movies from Unbox any-
time soon, but we’re perfectly content rent-
ing from the service.22 MAXIMUMPC | MAY 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
Amazon Unbox
No high defi nition, but tons of titles and a cheap-’n’-easy way to get them on your TV
In addition to purchasing movies in your web browser using Amazon’s standard web
interface, you can also browse and purchase films from within the Unbox client.VERDICT7
Movie rentals: $
Movie purchases:
$10 to $
TV episodes: $
http://www.amazon.com/unboxOne of Unbox’s strengths is its tight integration with TiVo. You can queue movies for
download to your TiVo from any PC.DOWNLOAD
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