I've Seen the Future and It's Slow - Very Slow

I'll admit that sometimes it's hard to know how to pass the time. Having too much leisure can be as much a curse as a blessing. Better to stay occupied and busy than let dullness and torpidity drain life of its vigor. Stimulation, that's what the human spirit needs, a sense of action and purpose.

So with that in mind let me tell you about the "Unbox" online video store that Amazon.com launched last week, because believe me, if you're the type that can be endlessly entertained by the slow creep of progress bars then "Unbox" will never leave you bored again. Oh, you haven't heard of the Amazon "Unbox"? Well then, let me explain.

For about the past year those Ipod folks have had it all over us poor Windows Media types. Although our devices could play music just like the Ipod and play video just like the Ipod, there weren't any Windows Media stores on the Internet where we could legally purchase video content that would play on our devices. The Ipod crowd could purchase videos from their Itunes Music Store, but the rest of us were left out in the cold.

That sort of changed earlier this year when Starz launched their Vongo service, but unfortunately that service only had support for 2 devices. Great if you happened to own one of those devices but not much use to anyone else.

Last week, however, Amazon.com launched their highly anticipated "Unbox", and for the first time the majority of Windows Media device owners had what the Ipodders merely took for granted; a place to shop for video downloads. Of course, as the owner of a Windows Media device (Creative Zen Vision:M) I signed right up, downloaded the software, and got right to it. Here's what I found.

First of all, the service works. For around 10 or 15 dollars you can download a movie and either watch it on your computer or transfer it to your portable device. Unfortunately, that's all you can do with it. You can't burn it to a DVD and watch it on your home theater like you would with a DVD purchased at the store. It either plays on your computer or your device. Period.

Well, they say there's one born every minute, but even a sucker like me can't get too excited over a deal like that. Why would I pay the same price online as I would in a store for something that's so limited in its use? Interestingly, Apple Computer also announced a similar sort of limited use movie download program today, and you have to believe that it isn't the technology companies that are trying to kill the online video business--it's Hollywood. I'm sure that Amazon and Apple would like to keep their customers happy by offering movies that can downloaded and owned and used just like any other purchased movie, but it appears that Hollywood is never going to let that happen. Instead, their real goal seems to be the destruction of the whole download model, which they must see as a threat to the current DVD/cable/pay-per-view model that's earning them such handsome returns.

Oh well, it goes without saying that I won't be downloading any movies from either Amazon or Apple anytime soon. However, I was interested in some of the TV shows that Amazon had for sale so I gave it a try, and here's where it gets interesting. Now of course there have been "Unbox" horror stories circulating around the net about broken downloads and licensing nightmares and all the sorts of thing you have to expect that from a brand new service. All I can say is that I downloaded a show to my computer and it played fine, and then I transferred it over to my device and it played fine there too. No horror stories from me except...

Before I go any futher I should also explain that Amazon.com touts their TV downloads as "DVD quality", which is good if you like quality, and bad if you've only got a limited time on this earth and want to experience something of life before you die. I can personally vouch for the quality of the videos. They look fantastic on both my computer monitor and on my media device, and look much, much, much, much, much better than any of the videos I've downloaded from Itunes. On the other hand, how does a 852 Megabyte download for a 40 minute show strike you? And you can forget about broadband or fast connections 'cause Amazon's servers don't care. At least they didn't care last weekend, and it took me at least 90 minutes to download a 40 minute video. If you do the math you'll see that comes out to about twice as long to download it as to watch it.

Luckily, Amazon will let you start watching the video as soon as you have downloaded enough to fill the playback buffer, so that cut the time between the start of the download to the point where I could start watching the show to about 1 hour and 5 minutes. Did I mention that this was a 40 minute show? Then again, when the video finally arrived it looked really good. The show looked so good, in fact, that I went ahead and ordered the rest of the season. I don't know what I was thinking but I figure that with only 23 more shows in the series to download I should be finished by around Christmas.

And they'll look really good.

Anyways, if you have a Windows Media device and you want to buy some video for it what other choice do you have? Just be patient and make sure you have plenty of room on your hard drive. At 850 MB per show you're gonna need it.