Amazon opens online movie store

Amazon released its long-awaited ‘Unbox’ webshop announced, where visitors can find video material ‘in DVD quality’. Unbox offers both movies and episodes of television series, with content provided by major film companies such as 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal, Warner and MGM and television networks such as CBS, Cartoon Network, Discovery and MTV. Not all material is for sale: many downloads can only be rented, and have to be removed from the computer after a week. Buy movies have a price tag of between eight and twenty dollars, although you can get a rented copy for less. Television series must fetch $1.99, whether rented or bought.

Installing the Amazon Unbox software is mandatory. This software has the so-called RemoteLoad functionality, which allows a customer to place their purchases on two different PCs and two different portable media players. The webshop uses the used in Windows Media Player WVC1codec, which packs a bit of movie into less than a gigabyte and a half. For portable media players, a file about a quarter of that size is offered. The advertising slogan ‘if you can unpack a DVD, you can download it from us’ is therefore a bit exaggerated: the average video enthusiast can remove the cellophane from a DVD without using Windows XP, something that is unavoidable for Unbox.

In any case, it seems that Amazon has managed to secure a good repertoire. From Star Trek to South Park and from Ben Hur to Mad Max: the web store is packed with blockbusters. They had to, because Apple is reportedly also going to launch a video shop for full movies next week, and that company has already acquired a significant share of the online video market with the sale of clips and series. Whether the battle between the two will break loose remains to be seen: the identical pricing of Amazon and Apple when it comes to downloading series suggests that the content providers have long agreed what they want to earn from downloading.