Amazon Unbox
Posted on | September 8, 2006 | 1 Comment
while Apple is almost certainly quite likely going to announce feature-movie downloads for the iTunes Music Store on next tuesdays special event, Amazon is first off the mark by having launched their movie download-service Unbox.com tonight. Unbox offers TV-episodes for $2 USD and movies in the range from $8 to 20$ for download, movies are also rented for $2 – $3 (that is for one playback!). according to TechCrunch, video is delivered in both a DVD-quality hi-res-file and a low-res version suitable for portable devices (both using DRM’ed Windows Media). Unbox.com is currently available to US-customers only.
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September 12th, 2006 @ 9:23 pm
[...] as expected, iTMS now sells feature-movie downloads for as low as $13 (pre-orders and first-week buyers) and $15 (regular price) – that’s right in the middle of Amazon’s Unbox rates ($8-20). movies are encoded in 640×480 H.264 (nearly DVD-quality), include Dolby Surround, and can of course be put on any video-enabled iPod under the same DRM-restrictions as iTMS tv-shows. the iTMS is starting with only 75 movie-titles as of today and is supplemented with iTunes 7 (cosmetic changes on the user-interface, album-artwork and gapless playback – a feature I ranted about some time ago) and several new iPod-models. there’s a new aluminium Nano in four selected colours (remember the mini-days) a tiny, square Shuffle-successor (very cool) and an upgraded 5.5G iPod (better battery life, lower price, more storage – yawn). still missing: the touchscreen-video-iPod which is rumoured about since…well, anyway. one more thing – iTV (codename!), a streaming-client connecting to any TV-set is announced for early 2007. through a Frontrow-like interface, iTV will bring your existing iTunes-library to your living-room. iTV won’t include any storage itself, and it’s unclear if it will be able to access media-files on a non-iTunes-fileshare or NAS-device (probably not, and even if, there won’t be any support for your pirated backup-divx ). [...]