Movies Daily by Zach Cannon

It’s a bit unusual for me to write a technology review. Actually, I’ve never done it before, but I attempted to use my TiVo is a new media kind of way this weekend by downloading a movie, and since this is a movie blog, I guess I can write a review of it here. Last fall, Amazon.com launched Unbox. It’s a iTunes-like service through which you can download movies, TV shows, music and other things to your computer or, if you own a TiVo that is connected to your home network, directly to your home entertainment system. This past weekend, I enjoyed a very lazy and rainy Sunday and rather than driving to the store to pick up a DVD, I decided to download the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon to my TiVo through Amazon for $3.99. I assumed that, since I had downloaded things from iTunes and used Comcast’s OnDemand service, that Unbox would work the same and I’d be able to download and watch the movie with relative ease.

I was wrong. By the end of my experiment with Unbox on TiVo yesterday, eight hours had passed, the movie downloaded twice to my box, and so did the pilot of Bionic Woman, yet I only watched on hour of the movie. Here’s what happened.

The first time the movie downloaded, it reached 59 minutes and stopped it’s progress. This could have been because the Internet connection I was on was slow, but it couldn’t have been that slow, since I used my girlfriend’s computer to talk to Amazon.com about the problem. It also could have been because I started watching the movie before it finished downloading, but I only did this after my TiVo told me it was OK (for anyone who doesn’t have one, you should know, this things are remarkably expressive). Or, my TiVo may have been full because my girlfriend was recording a marathon of America’s Next Top Model, but I had deleted seven hours of Breaking Bad, plus 23 TiVo suggestions to offset any damage Tyra Banks could do to my TiVo’s memory. It also could be because there was a problem with the Unbox network and, all self-righteousness aside, I think this fourth hypothesis was probably the case.

Once it became obvious that the movie had stopped downloading (the little purple icon that indicates a movie is recording had disappeared), I called Amazon. Actually, I had Amazon call me. I think it’s impossible to call Amazon; you have to give them your number, then they’ll call you. While it’s a little odd, you get about 30 seconds of wait time compared to the long queues you get with most places. Once I got on with a customer service rep, I explained my situation, they transferred me to Unbox support and my new rep reset the movie so I could download it again. He said within 15-20 minutes, it should start up again. I hung up, ate some dinner and waited.

And waited. An hour went by and no new movie. So I had Amazon call me again, was transferred again to Unbox technical support. My friendly new technical supporter told me that my old technical supporter had put the movie into the Media Library, a sort of digital bookshelf on Amazon.com that kept track of everything I downloaded. He initiated the download to my TiVo again, had me force a connection to the TiVo service, then assured me it would download this time. I left the connection page up to make sure everything downloaded, hung up the phone, and waited about ten minutes. I jumped over to the Now Playing page, and found Bionic Woman downloading in the place of In the Shadow of the Moon.

In the interest of plot, I suppose I should explain why Bionic Woman wound up on there. Back in September, when I was helping to prepare the Fall TV Issue for the old college paper I worked for, I attempted to download Bionic Woman and Journeyman early, while one of my colleagues did the same for Chuck and Life. I had seen Pushing Daisies in the summer thanks to my job in L.A. and we were going to put together a nice advanced review of five much-buzzed-about fall pilots. Unfortunately, Unbox only works on TiVos on a broadband/wireless network, not ones plugged into the phone line, like mine was at the time. It also on works on PCs, not Macs, which I use, so my colleague was left doing the brunt of the work while I only reviewed Pushing Daisies. Since then, Bionic Woman sat in my Media Library unwatched.

OK, now that you’re up to speed, I called again and told them the wrong thing was downloading, and they restarted In the Shadow of the Moon for what was either a first, second or third time, I’m not really sure. So the movie slowly downloaded while we watched a marathon of The Deadliest Catch on Discovery. After about three episodes, In The Shadow of the Moon had stopped short again, this time at 61 minutes. I watched the additional two minutes and was left on a cliffhanger (Where on the moon did Apollo 11 land?! There were boulders all around!).

By this time it had been 8 hours, over four times the length of the movie. By my calculations, this was more than enough time to drive to almost every Blockbuster and Mom-and-Pop video store in the greater Jacksonville area, find the movie, watch it and return it, all for a comparable price. I e-mailed Amazon later that night to ask for a refund. This afternoon, they granted it.

So, I can’t really say I’m peeved at Amazon, since they tried to help me out and did refund me, though their Unbox service still has a few kinks to work out. This can’t be a completely objective review unfortunately; other than iTunes, I haven’t used any other true direct-download services, so my perspective is obviously a little one-sided. But based on the difficulty I had even downloading a movie, let alone trying to watch it, Amazon Unbox gets a C-.

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