Unbox, You've Done Me Wrong

I've heard about Amazon's Unbox video service. The idea is that they want to compete with iTunes by letting users buy and rent content to watch with their software player. While I'll occasionally watch a missed episode on the computer, I'm not a big fan of watching content on the computer, and I'd rather watch it on my TV. However, last week I was enticed to download an advance episode of NBC's upcoming show, "The Bionic Woman," and I decided to get the jump on the Fall Season.

So, I headed over to Amazon, and found the show. As part of the intro, it was free, but it did have to go through my Amazon account, and let them know which credit card to charge my free episode to (???), but the transaction went through. Next I had to download a 6 meg player. All right, so far, so good. The player then found my purchase, and started the download.

This one hour TV show, that's barely 45 minutes without commercials was a full gigabyte download! If I wanted it with the additional files for a portable player, it was a whopping 1.2 gigs! Seriously, on my DSL connection via WiFi, this was a daunting download, and just about as big as anything I've ever attempted to squeeze through my narrow broadband connection of 768/128 kbps. Amazon should remember that not all of us have a fiber optic connection, and compress things more aggressively. Still, I persisted.

The Unbox player intimated at first that I would be able to watch the episode in a streaming format where I could start viewing after I downloaded some, and keep downloading the rest simultaneously. In fact, the entire gig needed to be on my hard drive before the viewing could begin.

OK, after hours of grabbing data, I had the full gigabyte of video, and the player ready to go. I had a week to watch the episode before my license expired. I eagerly started the Fall season and fired up my Unbox player. Hmmm. The graphics seem off on this show. This looks rather funky. Imagine turning the color setting back to 16 colors like in Windows 95, and that is what the episode looked like. I thought at first it was just the beginning, but it was the entire episode.

I went back now to try and grab a screen capture to show all of you exactly what I was talking about. Unfortunately, the saga continues. For whatever reason, Amazon Unbox won't even open, and the shortcut is missing or some such nonsense.

Let's summarize by saying that in my experience of one episode, I've found Amazon Unbox to be half baked. I've never had problems with any of the networks streaming content, and not had to download for days just to watch a single episode. I've also never experienced such poor video quality on any other video content I've watched on my computer. In the end, the price of free was just too expensive.

--Jonas