Unboxing Unbox

I’ve got more DVR capability in my home than should be legally allowed. But once in a while, Comcast will go sideways on me and my Cable TV signal will drop out. This varies from a brief drop that can be ignored to longer term drops. And all the DVRs in the world can’t help record a show when you don’t have a good signal.

One of my favorite new TV series, “Life” on NBC, was airing one night when the cable signal went goofy on me. My ReplayTV recorded the program, but there were significant gaps rendering it unwatchable. And Apple and NBC’s now infamous break-up meant I couldn’t go up to iTunes and purchase the episode.

So it was time to give Amazon’s Unbox video download service a try. I downloaded the free Unbox player to my PC, then purchased and downloaded the episode I wanted to watch. The whole process was pretty slick and very comparable to iTunes. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I prefer the Unbox video player over iTunes’ video playback functionality. The controls were intuitive, playback was smooth, and video and audio quality were excellent.

Amazon Unbox does have some drawbacks. Most notably, if you have a video capable iPod, you are out of luck if you want to load the downloaded video to it. Unbox only supports the Windows Media “Plays for Sure” variety of portable media players. Look, I get it… Unbox is a competitor to iTunes for downloadable video content. However, I think it is very short sighted of the company to simply ignore a very significant portion of the portable media market.

If a video is available on Unbox that isn’t available on iTunes, Amazon is still getting my money. Why not let me put it on my iPod? Perhaps there are technical reasons for this… supporting multiple video formats is probably a lot more complicated… or perhaps Amazon has exclusive agreements with content suppliers locking it into a certain format. At first blush, Amazon Unbox downloads are in Windows Media Video (WMV) format. However, when I tried to use Videora to convert the downloaded video to an iTunes/iPod compatible format, it failed. There’s a simple reason why… because these are protected WMV files. DRM rears its ugly head again. Of course, I could turn this argument on its head. Why doesn’t Apple open up iTunes and iPods to other formats, eliminating the need to convert to its MPEG-4 format?

I just hate this entire “Walled Garden” phenomenon. To me, I don’t really care what format a given video is in, I just want to play it on my device of choice. What matters to me is the hardware and interface. This is why I prefer making my own recordings over purchasing videos: flexibility. I realize that I contribute to the care and feeding of walled gardens every time I make a purchase from one, but what other choice is there?