Amazon Unbox: It (Mostly) Rocks

Continuing this long-time ReplayTV 4040 owner’s exploration of the TiVo Series2 PVR, as well as my investigation of direct-to-livingroom movie download services, I was prompted to (finally) test-drive Amazon’s Unbox service last week after the company rolled out its Unbox-on-TiVo enhancement. Unbox is based on Microsoft’s DRM technology, at least for rental and purchase downloads to PCs, and requires that you install a custom player application.

With the Series2, the downloads are in TiVo’s proprietary encrypted variant of MPEG-2, and the files are tagged as protected such that you can’t subsequently transfer them either to another TiVo or to a PC via the TiVo Desktop application or the web browser interface. For those of you who don’t already know, you can browse your TiVo from a network-connected PC or other browser-inclusive device by doing a ‘https’ access to the TiVo’s IP address. You’ll get prompted for a username and password; the former is ‘tivo’ and the latter is your account’s Media Access Key.

Rented content is downloadable to only a single destination device; you must begin watching it within a certain timeframe (normally 30 days) and it expires 24 hours after you begin watching it. These are all pretty standard rental terms; I’ve seen them before with the Xbox Video Marketplace, as well as with CinemaNow and Movielink. Purchased content, on the other hand, can be simultaneously housed on up to two Windows-based PC-and/or-TiVo devices at any particular point in time. And if you also choose to download the portable-tailored version of a file to your PC, you can subsequently transfer it to up to two PlaysForSure-compliant video players. Note that the content-complaint hardware list does not include Microsoft’s Zune, nor of course Apple’s iPhone or video-capable iPod.

Until recently, you acquired and initiated the download of content to a TiVo solely via Amazon’s website. After configuring both your TiVo and Amazon accounts to link them, you employ the Unbox RemoteLoad feature to select a download destination; either a TiVo or one of your PCs with Amazon’s Unbox video player already installed on it. The additional capability that Amazon and TiVo just ‘turned on’ is the ability to browse and acquire Unbox content directly from the TiVo GUI. In this latter respect, the TiVo is acting no different than the Xbox 360 in combination with the Video Marketplace; arguably, in fact, Unbox is competitively disadvantaged in this regard because there’s not (yet) any high-definition content available (nor, even if there was, could I play it on the Series2). But the ability to acquire content and kick off a download from any web browser is unique to Unbox and it’s really slick; you can, for example, rent a movie from work (on your lunch hour, and via your own computer, of course….ahem….) and it’ll be waiting for you on the TiVo or PC when you get home that night.

It took a while for TiVo to ‘push’ the new Unbox feature down to my Series2, so I began my inspection by purchasing the nine episodes of The Animatrix (at 99 cents apiece) from the Amazon website. Animation’s (particularly computer-generation animation’s) distinct edges and abrupt color transitions make it a particularly challenging test for a video codec, and I wanted to see just how good Amazon and TiVo’s MPEG-2 implementation was. The content began downloading to the TiVo shortly after I pressed the Purchase button, although it took much longer than I expected for each file to trickle down my 50 Mbps fiber pipe. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to determine download speed via a TiVo percentage-complete report or other like information.

Looking at the resultant TiVo folder contents, you’ll see several different bitrates represented. Most of the files had an approximately 3 Mbps average bitrate (I have no way of knowing whether they were encoded at a constant or variable bitrate), but three of the episodes (Program, Matriculated and Beyond) were encoded at twice that bitrate (i.e. ~6 Mbps). The lower-bitrate content looked surprisingly good, partly because it was letterboxed within a 4:3 frame and therefore only took up part of my widescreen display’s real estate.

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