Six weeks ago, my monthly TiVo newsletter informed me of a partnership they had formed with Amazon to provide their Unbox video download service to TiVo subscribers. The Unbox service allows you to purchase or "rent" movies and television episodes through the Amazon website. Once your purchase is made, you can download the video to your computer (or potentially multiple computers if the copyright allows) for watching. Your rental is good for 30 days, however that changes to 24 hours once you start playing the video for the first time. Your purchased videos can always be downloaded from the service, so you don't have to store it permanently on your hard drive or TiVo (where space is at a higher premium).
The notice from TiVo came along with a $15 credit to the Unbox service if I signed up by April 30. If you have a TiVo connected to your home network, you've still got a few days to sign up and get the credit, too. Who doesn't like getting something for free? So I signed up so I could try out the service at a later date.
The sign-up process was a simple one. First, you should login to your TiVo account on the TiVo web site and turn on video downloads. Next, you visit the Unbox web site and link your TiVo unit with your Amazon.com account. Once that's done, you can purchase videos from the Unbox web site and have them delivered to your TiVo (or downloaded to your PC if you prefer). Videos delivered to your TiVo appear in the "Now Playing" list under a group named Amazon.com Unbox.
My wife and I decided to try out the service this past Sunday evening after a long (but fun) weekend entertaining a family member staying at our house for a few days. Since neither of us felt like making the drive to a video rental store and I had the $15 credit, the Unbox service seemed like a perfect solution.
We browsed the Unbox web site and settled on renting The Devil Wears Prada (obviously, her choice). It was here that the first potential problem with the Unbox service on TiVo was discovered. Not every movie is TiVo compatible. It seems most new movies are compatible, but you have to keep an eye out on the listing page for the "Also Works with: TiVo" tag. It appears that most new movies and television shows are compatible, but I'd hate to get burned on this the one time I forget to explicitly check.
After making your first purchase on the site, apparently all future purchases are done with "1-Click". As far as I can tell, there is no way to turn this off. I really don't like this. I don't like 1-Click. I don't like anything that doesn't let me confirm purchase details before being charged. I'm human and I make mistakes. What kind of person is in such a hurry to rent / purchase a video that they don't have time to make a couple extra clicks in order to review their order? Forcing Unbox users in to using a "feature" that's optional on the main Amazon.com web site doesn't make sense to me.
The Unbox on TiVo FAQ states that new purchases should show up in your TiVo's "Now Playing" list after about 15 minutes. I don't know the exact amount of time I had to wait, but it was probably between 15-20 minutes. Unfortunately, I was soon to discover the biggest drawback of the service.
You can't watch videos while they are still downloading to your TiVo.
To me, this is an inexcusable limitation of the service. Your TiVo is constantly recording live television and allowing you to pause, rewind, and play the resulting video data. Content that is being recorded from your cable or satellite signal can be watched while it's being recorded. So why on earth can't I start watching the movie I'm in the middle of downloading???
The web site claims that it can download a typical movie in about an hour and a 1-hour TV episode in 30 minutes. The Devil Wears Prada is a 1 hour 49 minute movie. It took 2 hours and 38 minutes to download. According to the information available from TiVo, the video file of the download was 2.37 GB in size. That means that the TiVo was downloading at a rate of about 250 KB/s. My Road Runner cable modem service usually clocks in at about 5 Mb which is capable of sustaining a 600 KB/s transfer rate - a speed I regularly attain during BitTorrent downloads or well-known sites where server-side bandwidth limitations aren't in play. In other words, with my broadband connection, I should have been able to download this movie in a little over an hour.
Being able to purchase the movie through a web site in advance and have it waiting on my TiVo when I get home is a nice idea. However, the big draw of being able to purchase content electronically is its immediate availability, which facilitates a more impulse driven decision making process. Now that I know I must wait for the delivery of this content to be complete before it can be consumed, my impulse purchase decisions will be on a much slower trigger than it should be for such a service. Coupled with the fact that the prices on the site are pretty much comparable to acquiring the physical media from a store and I fail to see much of a benefit to the service outside of the convenience factor it offers when planning ahead. Perhaps I'm in the minority here, but it's not often that I plan ahead on a movie rental.
Amazon.com Unbox on TiVo:
Pros:
- Allows me to purchase videos from a remote location and have it delivered to my TiVo.
- Good video quality (no pixels were visible when pausing the movie unlike content recorded from my television - even when it's recorded on the Highest quality setting).
- ....um....I got $15 in free purchases??
- Not all content on Unbox is TiVo compatible.
- Can't watch a video until the download is complete.
- Download was slow considering available bandwidth of my connection.
- No price savings despite electronic delivery of content.
- Allow me to start watching videos while it's still downloading to minimize the wait time for those times when you didn't plan out your purchase in advance.
- A progress indicator while downloading - if you can tell what percentage of an update is downloaded when I initiate a connection to the TiVo service, you can do the same thing here.
- Faster downloads!!!