Amazon Unbox Video - You Gotta Be Kidding Me

Amazon is late to the downloadable music and movies market, trailing Apple and others. This is the year they are going to play catch up. And then they unload this crap on us.

That's not going to fly. I am sure of it.

Comments

[Cyanbane]

I completely agree. I love amazon but was completely underwhelmed I posted about it here (and there is a great comment from Titus B).

[hank Williams]

I agree that the service is crappy, but I dont agree that they had much of a choice - other than maybe just not offering a service. The problem is that if you allowed people to play rented music on DVD with a blockbuster type pricing, then no one would ever buy, because you dont have to send the disk back to amazon. In other words people would have permanent disks for $4 instead of $15. The movie companies would never go along with this... for good reason. It would take sale prices down by %75 to %80. What they probably should have done is only offered a purchase service and not a rental. Then they could maybe have convinced the film companies to let them burn DVDs that are playable in a DVD player. To me, that would have been the most reasonable solution, but no matter what, they are going to be at a disadvantage to Apple, who will probably offer a hardware/software combo that resolves these DRM issues in a consumer friendly and film industry friendly way. It will probably some kind of Airport Express type product for video. My guess is we will see that announced today.

[Ian Spivey]

Someday the content owners and their jack-booted thugs are going to figure out that most people who are inclined to pirate media are doing it already. There's really no incremental harm in releasing un-DRM'ed media. I could already go and download every show online as soon as it's aired if I were so inclined, but I'd rather pay the rightful owner than muck around with shady services. I won't pay the owners, however, until they start offering a product I can actually own. Maybe the strategy is to make online so cumbersome that consumers keep overpaying for DVDs long beyond what should have been their technological obsolescence?

Does anyone disagree -- is there still a compelling reason for all this DRM? Legal action and moral values are the deterrents to piracy, not availability of content.