The bad reviews keep coming:
Have you ever seen a really bad Hollywood movie and wondered, Did anybody in Hollywood watch this movie before releasing it? Did no one have the courage to stand up to the director or the studio head and say, “This movie sucks”?
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The reason I ask is because both Amazon.com (Charts) and Apple (Charts) parted the curtains recently on new, legal digital movie download services.
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Amazon.com’s Unbox is a horror show. The Unbox service appears not so much to have been introduced as to have escaped from the laboratory.
Let’s start with the marketing slogan:
In pimping its new Unbox service, Amazon says, “If you can unwrap a DVD, you can do DVD-quality downloads. It’s that easy, and less sticky.”
I don’t mean to quibble with Amazon, but rarely does it take me five hours, multiple software downloads, and wrestling with Microsoft Windows to unwrap a DVD.
So what happens after the author waited five hours and the finally downloaded?
The nastiest surprise at this point was that none of the navigation controls on the Unbox Video Player worked, other than “pause” and “stop.” I could not select scenes, fast-forward, reverse or do anything but play the movie start to finish.
Hey, can’t the movie also be viewed on “Plays For Sure” mobile video players?
The Unbox download service actually delivers two files to the computer, one that plays on a computer (although only in the Unbox Video Player), and a second, smaller file that will play on a small variety of Windows “Plays for Sure” portable media players
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Amazon lists six players – two by Archos, two by Creative and one each by Toshiba (which is also making Microsoft’s forthcoming Zune media player) and iRiver. I tried connecting another “Plays for Sure” Creative player and it crashed my computer.
How do you view these movies on your TV set?
But really, who wants to watch a movie on the small screen? I want to watch the downloaded movie on the big screen TV in the other room.
Amazon offers this helpful advice: “In most cases, connecting your computer to your TV is as simple as using an S-Video connection.” Yeah, assuming I have a 50-foot S-Video cable. But, darn it, S-Video transfers only the video part of the movie, so I’ll also need 50 feet of audio cable, unless I’m fond of silent movies.
Gee, I wonder if there is some solution out there that can receive video that I purchased using my desktop or laptop and display the video on a TV without too much hassle?
Is there anything the reviewer likes about Unbox?
Amazon’s Unbox – who came up with that dopey name?
No, not really.
