Is Amazon Unbox on TiVo Worth the Effort? »
Just a bit over seven months ago, TiVo announced that they were making the Amazon Unbox service available to everyone. Well, perhaps not users of Series 3 boxes, but they are already out in the cold for so many reasons that it didn't really matter. What seemed interesting was that this meant that you could actually download content from Amazon straight into your living room. It's an interesting model, and one that bears looking at.
I have to say that even though I'm a fan of online purchases - I regularly buy things online - the online delivery of video isn't really something that I've been a fan of, and the problems that came along with the Unbox service (not being able to transfer content elsewhere, etc) made it seem all the worse. Perhaps being able to use it on the TiVo would make those issues go away. As it turns out, that's not really the case.
The first thing you have to do is connect your TiVo to your Amazon account, and this really isn't difficult. In fact, I was impressed with how easy they made it. In fact, if you're determined, you can even do the setting of your PIN from he TiVo itself (though this involves a whole lot of keying, a nuisance if you use any special characters in your passwords). But once the two are linked up, you can quite easily make purchases, and then you just specify a five-digit PIN when you make them, which is a nice feature to keep kids from racking up mountains of debt when they find something through Unbox that they'd like to buy.
Another nice feature is that there are periodic sales on Unbox - often each weekend has a sale movie, and every so often there is a theme sale on (for instance, right now there is a Halloween sale happening). This is definitely a nice feature, because some of the movies will cost you as much as you'll pay for a DVD. That's a bit much, but when the sale price drops to $0.99, it's not bad.
Where I've really found the sweet spot, however, is that Unbox has a selection of yet-to-be-released content (mostly previews of new shows). This isn't really new to TiVo, as they did something last year with The Class where you could get it prior to the show actually airing. This year, they did the same thing, but you had to get it through Unbox - and it was all free. Of course, I'm sure this has to come with a hefty subsidy from the network, but it's still free to you and I, but it's a nice feature.
The nice thing is that you select the content and some time later it appears, ready-to-go. It's actually really cool. There are just a few problems that I've found with it.
#1 - The content doesn't get organized with other content of a similar nature. For instance, if you look at shows, you may have downloaded the pilot for the Bionic Woman. But if you decided you wanted to keep it, along with the other episodes as they aired, you wouldn't get them in one group. The pilot you received from Unbox would be grouped in an Unbox group instead. This is probably understandable, but I'd like to see it in a group with the rest of the episodes - they need to work out a metadata format to make this happen.
#2 - Because of this missing metadata, there is no record that you've already watched this show. If I give this show a thumb rating (up or down, it doesn't matter), it won't affect anything, except in how I rate Unbox in general, and I'm only going to get Unbox if I go get it anyway. It would be uber-cool if Unbox would pull content that I rated well (free content, obviously) automatically.
#3 - Still sticking with the metadata theme, let's say I want to get a Season Pass for the Bionic Woman. I can't do so without going in and setting it up manually. I'd love to be able to go into the new More Options section and see which episodes are coming up, as well as subscribe to the season pass. I'm sure that the networks would expect that I could have done this. But there's currently no way to do it. Give me my metadata!
#4 - Ultimately, the Unbox format blows because I can't do anything with it. The digital rights management required means I can't copy it off of the TiVo in any way. Not by using the ultra-dated Save to VCR function (why is that even still there), not by transferring to TiVo Desktop, not by transferring to another TiVo in another room (which we have). In other words, if I want to save this episode - which thankfully I didn't pay for - I have to leave it on my TiVo forever. What if I had downloaded it by paying good money? I'd be royally ticked off. This alone is the good reason that I'd never buy anything via Unbox, and certainly not via my TiVo.
I've heard complaints about quality, but frankly I thought it was fine. I'm more concerned about These items. What about you? Any thoughts? Have you tried Unbox, either on your computer or on your TiVo?
