Amazon Unbox Opens to Awful Reviews

Surprising no one (it has been leaked weeks ago), Amazon launched its video download service, called Unbox, last week. The reviews have been pouring in over the weekend, none of them very positive. Here's a roundup of what people are saying.

First there's the price: Downloaded movies are the same price as physical DVDs, but you can't burn that DVD on a disc that can be played on a real DVD player. Then there's the biggest of the complaints: Unbox is hobbled with massive DRM restrictions. All movies have to be watched on your computer, a real thrill for most people, I'm sure. And though you can "back up" your Unbox movies to disc, again, that disc can only be played on Amazon's custom Windows media player. Even worse: The movies can only be played on the computer that you used to download the film. In other words, if you downloaded the movie on your desktop and want to play it on your laptop on the plane, you're out of luck. Ars Technica writes that it had problems even getting videos downloaded successfully, much less playing them.

Cnet's Tom Merritt says that Unbox is completely broken: He downloaded a $1.99 video and it simply wouldn't play. After some fiddling, he got it to work. Then "the real trouble began." Unbox launches itself at startup, and Merritt disabled this behavior, which then prevented him from uninstalling the Unbox player. Only after severe headache (and reinstalling Unbox) was he able to get it off his machine... to good riddance, it seems.

Unbox also reports back to Amazon pretty much constantly, and the license ensures that Amazon can do an insane amount of awful things to you: Amazon can delete the movies you bought without notice, can send you ads via the Unbox player, can disable features on the Unbox player at any time, and requires you to send one pint of blood to Amazon HQ three times a year. OK, not that last part, but overall these terms are pretty much awful.

Bottom line: Given the ridiculous price of movies through Unbox, the onerous terms of use, and the god-awful DRM, there's not a single reviewer on earth (at least not one that I can find) that actually recommends the service.