Whose Faulty Vision

Amazon Unbox Review

Last weekend, I rented a movie from Amazon Unbox for the first time. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a service for TiVo that lets you rent movies via download. Since the TiVo is connected to my TV, I can watch rented movies on my big TV screen instead of my little computer screen, unlike some of the rival movie download rental services.

My verdict, the short version: It’s good. It isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough that I never need to set foot in a Blockbuster again, thus putting an end to the whole Blockbusted saga. Good riddance–if Blockbuster goes out of business, I won’t miss them a bit.

My verdict, the long version: To start with, the rental interface on the TiVo is terrible. You can only browse a small number of movie rentals–the top sellers and a couple of random categories (not including horror, what’s up with that?). Anything beyond that, you have to search by title, and of course a TV remote, even a well-designed one like the TiVo remote, is terrible for trying to enter text.

Fortunately, you don’t have to use the rental interface on the TiVo. Instead, you can use your computer to go to Amazon’s Unbox website and browse rentals that way, using Amazon’s much better interface (and searching with a keyboard). When you pick out a movie, you can tell it to send it to your TiVo instead of watching it on your computer, and the TiVo starts downloading it. Which is really handy in and of itself, but as a side benefit, it means I can pick out a movie at work, and have it done downloading by the time I get home.

Once the movie is downloaded to the TiVo, it works just like a recorded TV show–it even shows up in the same “Now Playing” menu, right alongside your shows. Like a recorded TV show, or like a real rented DVD, you can pause, fast-forward, rewind, whatever. It doesn’t have the special features that a DVD would, but it doesn’t have all of the annoying crap (like ads you can’t skip, FBI warnings, etc) either, so that’s mostly a wash. Commentary tracks would be nice, I guess.

Picture quality is good. Not DVD-quality, but good. Pricing is fine too–$3 for older movies, $4 for new releases, seems pretty much in line with what you’d pay at a video store. Once you rent a movie, you have 30 days to start watching it, and once you’ve started watching it, you have 24 hours to finish. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Selection is a little lacking. It’s not terrible, and I can’t imagine ever having trouble finding something I’m interested in, but it could be a lot better. (In fairness, the movie I ended up renting, the 1972 production of Man of La Mancha, is fairly obscure, and it was on there.) And it’s annoying that there are a fair number of movies that are only available for sale, not for rental. If I buy a movie, I want an actual physical disc–I don’t want to take the risk of a hard drive crash wiping out my movie collection. I assume that the selection issues are due to negotiations with the various studios, and they’ll undoubtedly improve if people use the service. And of course, the selection tradeoff is that you’ll never run into a movie that you can’t rent because someone else has already checked it out.

It’s incredibly convenient. You don’t have to go out to the store, you don’t have to return the movie when you’re done with it. I don’t know how long it takes to download, since I rented the movie at work and watched it a couple of hours later when I got home. I know you can’t necessarily start watching immediately, because it needs to download enough to build up a buffer. But it’s fast enough to work for me.

I’m happy with my one experiment with the service, and definitely planning on using it to rent movies in the future. And I’m thrilled that I now have a convenient movie rental option other than Blockbuster *spit*.