Amazon Unbox: Movie Downloads Just Aren't There Yet

To much fanfare, Amazon.com this week unveiled their new movie download service, Amazon Unbox. The speculations had been running wild before this announcements, and some bloggers even praised Amazon as "the new Google". Now, after seeing the final product that Amazon just released, everybody is simply quite disappointed. Reviews range from the mildly positive to the downright slating.

Amazon based Unbox on Microsoft's DRM technology, the same stuff that many smaller music download stores and early movie-download services such as CinemaNow use. This means that users have to download a special player that works only on Windows XP. Handling your content licenses in this technology is quite cubersome. Very often -- I'm speaking from my own experience -- you'll find yourself unable to play a movie because the DRM somehow decided that your license for this piece of content has expired. The software frequently accesses the Internet, so playing movies offline (like, for instance, on a plane) is often not possible at all. And copying your content to a mobile device (only Windows-media compatible of course, no iPods please) is equally difficult. In other words: It's unusable for normal people.

Now let's look at the value proposition from the perspective of a user that is not interested in how cool movie downloads over the Internet are, but simply in getting movies. And let's compare that to Comcast's on Demand service and my local video store:

Service	Amazon Unbox	Comcast OnDemand	Video Store
Price per movie	$9.99	$3.99-$11.99	$4.50 for two days
Download time	5 - 60 minutes	10 seconds	A trip to the store (10 minutes)
Selection	A few thousand	A few dozen	A few hundred
Plays on	PC, some mobile devices	TV	TV, PC, mobile DVD players

 

Hmm. Amazon Unbox obviously has the advantage of a comparatively broad selection (although it's currently nowwhere near real "Long Tail" economics). On the other hand, it's the most expensive and has the highest hassle factor. OK, if you download a movie from Unbox, you theoretically "own" it, but considering the limitations and DRM hassle, no self-respecting cinephile would see this as a replacement for a DVD collection.

Sorry, but this value proposition is simply not good enough. Music downloads work because you get what you want (a specific song) for very little money ($0.99 instead of $15 for the whole CD album with useless filler songs) very quickly (a few seconds of download time). The disadvantages of Amazon Unbox mean that it probably will work as a second-best replacement where the other methods aren't available, but in this form I'd be surprised if it would turn out to be a success.

So let's see what Apple will announce next week. 

Comments

[Marcel Marchon]

Actually, you forgot to mention that Amazon also offers movies for rent - you download it and you can watch it during a 24 hour window. We tried that last week and watched a rather enjoyable movie for $2.99. Going to the Video Store IS a major hassle for us - since we usually want to watch movies at 11pm on short notice and we don't have one across the street - it takes rather longer than 10 minutes. Yes, the DRM stuff is annoying, but for rentals, I think that's ok, since you probably only watch it once anyway. The quality was actually pretty good we thought - but then, these days we watch movies on our 17'' flat screens attached to our computers - we don't really have a TV ... For that setting, the quality was quite acceptable.

[eyetag]

whats your source for amazon having a few thousand vids available and comcast just a few dozens? as far i know comcast has 800+ movies available at onDemand..? is there any difference in comcasts or amazons movie content sourcing capabilities/processes?

[eyetag]

hm, seems that this thread is dead. bad luck, would have appreciated your view on this...