p2pnet.net News:- It’s hard to imagine a worse name for a new product than ‘Unbox,” but that’s what marketeers at Amazon.com decided to call their new video downoad venture.

It’s a mish-mash of the usual tacky corporate attempts to rip online movie lovers off and it launched, “to some fairly harsh reviews,” says The Seattle Times, going on:

“BusinessWeek described it as ’shackled by a raft of viewing limitations imposed by movie studios.’ Techdirt said the service was ‘me too,’ with ‘all the problems of just about every other video download offering out there’. Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg couldn’t get a video to download and was told he needed to purchase that TV program again. ‘Time to uninstall this thing and hope it didn’t screw up my PC in the process,’ he wrote.

“And the Good Morning Silicon Valley blog quoted analyst Richard Greenfield of Pali Capital, who said, ‘the rules and pricing scheme of Unbox make us believe that movie studios do not want legal movie downloading to be terribly successful in the near-intermediate term’.”

We wrote Amazon had, “amidst the usual mainstream media hype and hoopla,” opened its Windows XP-reliant, DRM-loaded Unbox online store peddling old movies such as Office Space (1999) for $13.45, or newer movies such as last year’s Rumor Has It for $19.62.

We continued, “Yesterday, an Ipsos study revealed US punters haven’t been falling over themselves to spend their hard-earned money on Hollywood downloads, old or new, and at those kinds of prices, and given that the movies come loaded with Digital Restrictions, that’s hardly surprising.”

And, “to be allowed the privilege of purchasing a video that I can’t burn to DVD and can’t watch on my iPod, I have to allow a program to hijack my start-up and force me to login to uninstall it?” - asks Tom Merritt on the CNET Blog.

“No way.”

Also See:
The Seattle Times - Unbox reviewers unimpressed, September 11, 2006
hype and hoopla - Amazon Unbox with DRM, September 8, 2006
CNET Blog - My fight with Amazon Unbox , September 8, 2006

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