Amazon today unveiled their new video download service: Unbox, rumored for several months. Apple is expected to announce the iTunes Movie Store on September 12th; I imagine that Amazon wanted to beat them to it by at least a few days.

The service is built on Microsoft’s Media Player architecture, and utilizes Microsoft’s DRM (Digital Rights Management). Some of the consequences of this are:

1. You can only use a Windows PC with the service - no Macintosh or Linux support
2. You can transfer the video to “approved portable devices” and watch it there (basically, any devices that play well with Windows Media) - note that Apple’s iPod does not play well with Windows Media
3. You cannot create a proper DVD that will play in a DVD player
4. You can back up your video files the way you would normal files
5. If you want to watch video on TV, you’ll have to watch in full screen mode on a Windows computer or portable device with TV out

Amazon has two models for how you license video from them. You can rent or buy. Rentals are good for 30 days, or 24 hours after you start watching them. Office Space, for instance, costs $2.99 to rent. It looks like you can’t generally rent individual TV episodes or seasons.

Or you can buy. When you buy, you get unlimited views. Office Space, for instance, costs $13.45 to buy. A quick glance around shows a spectrum of purchase prices for movies, from $9.99 to $19.99. I couldn’t really see a pattern to them; there were some recent releases for $9.99 and some for more; some older films were higher priced. It looks like you do get a discount if you purchase a whole season of a TV show.

There are no subscription fees. Presumably all the normal Amazon discounts apply (the 1.57% discount for using Amazon’s A9 search service regularly, the 3% rebate for using the Amazon Visa card).

Once you download a video, you can still download it again if you lose it. This is a significant difference from Apple’s iTunes Music Store where you can download a video or music file a single time.

Given that I use a Mac, I couldn’t test video quality, but I would expect it to be reasonable.

It looks like Unbox offers fewer TV shows than iTunes (though it does offer some Star Trek shows). It offers movies today. We’ll see next week what range of movie downloads iTunes offers. Rumor has it that Apple has been trying to negotiate a fixed $9.99 price with movie studios for all movies, and that the studios haven’t been willing to do that. Even so, if movies available via iTunes grow the way that TV shows have since iTunes started offering them last fall, the amount of content available will grow rapidly over time.

Should you use Amazon’s service? If you don’t have high speed Internet or a Windows PC that you’re happy watching movies on or able to hook up to a TV, you’re pretty much out of luck. Otherwise, if the restrictions are acceptable to you, it’s looks like a reasonable service.

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