I am an Avid Movie Watcher. I watch most of my Standard Definition DVDs in one uninterrupted seating. Sometimes, for whatever reason, a movie gets interrupted and I am unable to return to it for a couple of days. This DRM hitch makes this technology unusable for me. Don't get me wrong. I regularly buy from Amazon.com with click -one settings and I am a huge fan of Tivo - I use it everyday. But I doubt I will use this service when I can return one of my Blockbuster Total Access movies back to the store and get something on impulse. Doesn't make sense to me.

Yeah, I tried it out. The download took FOREVER and I'm on a fast Comcast connection. (like 5+ hours). We finally watched the moving last night and there was quite a bit of artifacting in fast moving scenes. The quality of sound etc... was good. I think one thing that is critically missing is that I like my movies in surround sound...

I wonder what the download time is like, especially since you've gotta wait for it to be completely on your system before you can watch it.

And Mac users left out in the cold on the unbox player, for shame.

The rental piece doesn't much interest me because of the 24-hr limitation. However, for $1.99 TV episodes it is a great solution. I can pull up "Vitameatavegamin" any time I want!

As far as the picture quality, though it may not be DVD pristine, it is pretty clean. Definitely better than a standard Tivo recording. Realistically, just about any standard-def content blown up on an HD will demonstrate its shortcomings.

Hopefully over time as bandwidth increases HD content will be available for all you S3 owners.

But overall the thing that impresses me with Unbox is that it works cleanly and easily to get content on my PC, Zen Vision:M for portable video, or now to the Tivo. Contrast with the scary Wal-Mart download service.

Regards,
Timothy

Right, on the Mac front we're hosed with our NetFlix subscriptions too!

I found the video quality to be pretty good (near DVD-quality, but not quite). Not having surround sound was, of course, less than preferable. The download time is acceptable if you, say, rent a movie at work (early in the day) - it should be ready for you when you get home. But $3.99 is *way* too much. It should be half that, at most. I'll use up my $15 in credits, but I doubt I'll pay out of my own pocket for rentals when I can use my far cheaper gameznflix account and get the actual DVD (or HD-DVD) with all of the bonus features, perfect picture, and full-channel sound intact (and no horribly annoying DRM!). This is a fantastic start (the process is very smooth), but it hasn't won my $$ yet.

I'm terribly fearful of that nonresumption of canceled downloads bit. If I'm taking five hours to download something, there's a fairly decent chance my dsl is going to drop connection during that time. I'd hate to be screwed out of my money because of that. Looks like Amazon Unbox ain't for me.

Charybdis says: I'm terribly fearful of that nonresumption of canceled downloads bit.
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Oh yeah, I forgot to comment on that. That worries me too. 6 hours is a long, sustained download. I can easily imagine an interruption happening during that amount of time. I'm thinking about sacrificing some of my free $15 by pulling the plug on my router during a rental download to see how it's handled (will TiVo be "smart" and try to resume and, if so, will Amazon allow such a resumption if it's within a minute or two?). None of this would be "official", but maybe the contract is just explaining the worst-case scenario in order to cover all the bases (and, hopefully, in practice it's not as bad as it sounds)...?

I think this is a good step in the right direction.

The non-resuming is awful. I've tried downloading several different movies and it has never worked over my slightly-flakey university provided connection. I have usually got about 60 minutes into the movie before it will stall for a hour then erase, reconnect and start downloading again only to get a minute or less. (I'll be browsing off the same connection the entire time - so it's not like I have a full on connection blow out).

Another thing that they don't tell you is that if you try to transfer a movie from your PC it will cancel your unbox download without warning - wasting 3.99. The bugs need to be worked out of this system- seems like an alpha or beta service.

I will say that Amazon and Tivo's support department are very nice and will credit your account after a short phone call - but the hassle is not worth it for a pay-per-view download.

I'm not sure why I'd want to pay $4 to rent a movie for a day, spending hours downloading it, when I can get a higher quality movie for the same price through DirecTV pay-per-view. The movie will stay on my TiVo until I delete it. On the plus side, downloading old TV shows is convenient. But between pay-per-view and DVD rental services, I don't see Unbox having a big following.

Mac users are NOT left out. you can download DIRECTLY to TiVo... no computer necessary.

I have a Mac and I downloaded 2 movies last weekend and watched them just fine.

This whole service already seems so last year. Why can't we just have all movies on demand from our cable company in full HD?

I think that Tivo UnBox has gotten a bad rep from all these comments. It isn't perfect but how long ago did it roll out? a week?

Both Tivo unbox and Amazon unbox straight to pc are great (s-video cable anyone?) for anyone who has accessibility issues. I recently had knee surgery and don't have the option of going to bestbuy, blockbuster, or even the mailbox for that matter.

This may be a niche service to start (for people w/o digital cable, w/tivo and w/o hd/surround) but it has the bases covered and for a launch service has been very easy to use.

The price of $15 is steep for new releases (MI:iii etc) but $3 to own the matrix forever is a pretty damn good deal. Bottom Line: This service has the potential to put a dent in Vongo, Walmart, Blockbuster, Netflix and even pirated movies/TV shows. Amazon has proven its business model through innovation and promotion.

I doubt that this service will flounder with the full backing of Tivo and Amazon. It is nice to see new content added everyday. In a year you will probably be using this service for something.

@ sproinky- I agree with you. I did offer some complaints, but it definitely isn't my intention to "blast" the service. The complaints I mentioned are only the things that I think will prevent it from really taking off in a big way. Overall, the service is really cool and is, by far, the easiest, most streamlined way I've ever seen of downloading and "using" digital entertainment. If they can get the rental price down ($1.99?), and solve the download-inturruption problem, this service will be huge, IMO.

I've used this a few times, it is pretty nice, except for the long download times. Although I don 't really like the fact that movie rentals are only playable for 24 after you start them.

WOW! what an amazing let down.

i was led to think that the movie rentals would be $1.99 and last for at least a month.

now, i find they're $3.99 and last for 24 hours! forget it!

that is absolutely the most retarded business model i have ever seen.

tivo and amazon, you'd just lost some serious biz from a loyal customer. thanks alot for trying to give us the shaft, you @ssh0les.

This sounds great, but as stated before the non-resuming is a big turn off. In fact, I'll probably never use this for that reason alone. I'd much rather have Netflix + HandBrake or iTunes movies for the simple fact that, though they are not the highest quality, are still clean, have good sound, and allow me to resume download if my connection goes out, which has happened a few times.

Oh, I forgot about the 24 hour limit. Um..no. That sucks no matter how you slice it. I think a more sensible limit would be to simply limit the amount of times you can watch the movie, like say twice or three times then it expires. I have no problem with that. That's usually how often I'd ever watch a rental anyway.