This week instead of offering 99 cent rentals, Amazon is offering free rentals or purchases of downloads of 24 “classic” films. These movies can be played under Microsoft Windows, compatible portable devices, and on networked Tivo Series 2 and Series 3/HD boxes.

First, the films you can outright purchase for free. If they behave the way other films from Amazon do, you’ll be able to re-download them again later and they won’t expire once you’ve downloaded them.

Click on the title to see the movie’s listing at Amazon.

Charade
His Girl Friday
House on Haunted Hill
Love Affair
The Man With the Golden Arm
My Man Godfrey
Penny Serenade
The Snows of Kilmanjaro
Till the Clouds Roll By
Under Western Stars

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Amazon has six more cheap (99 cent) movie rentals for download this weekend. These prices are good until midnight Sunday November 4th. They’ve both reduced the total number of cheap movies they’re offering and reduced the amount of horror now that it’s post-Halloween.

As usual, you can direct the download of these movies to a Tivo that’s been associated with your Amazon account, or you can view them on Microsoft Windows or a supported portable device.

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Amazon has eight more cheap (99 cent) movie rentals for download this weekend. These prices are good until midnight Sunday October 28th. There’s even more horror available. I wonder if they’ll keep doing this post-Halloween?

As usual, you can direct the download of these movies to a Tivo that’s been associated with your Amazon account, or you can view them on Microsoft Windows or a supported portable device.

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Amazon has eight more cheap (99 cent) movie rentals for download this weekend. These prices are good until Sunday October 21st. It looks like they’re hitting the horror a bit for Halloween.

As usual, you can direct the download of these movies to a Tivo that’s been associated with your Amazon account, or you can view them on Microsoft Windows or a supported portable device.

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Amazon has made several movie downloads available for rental at only $0.99 via their Unbox service.

Downloaded movies can be viewed once within 30 days of the rental date. Once you start watching one, you have 24 hours to finish it. You can view them on your Windows PC, a compatible Windows mobile device, or a compatible Tivo unit (which must have a high speed Internet connection) which is registered with Amazon.

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Amazon is offering a nice discount on iLife ‘08 and iWork ‘08 for Macintosh. This is the best price I’ve seen on them, and Amazon ships them for free.

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At least, semi-officially. The store is now in “public beta”.

Click through here to check it out.

Salient points:

• Tracks are encoded as 256Kbps VBR MP3 files, without any DRM restricting your ability to use them
• Most songs are 89 or 99 cents, compared to $1.29 for iTunes Plus
• If you buy an album, you must download it using Amazon’s MP3 Installer. You can download individual songs with or without the installer
• Amazon’s MP3 Installer will automatically add the song to iTunes or Microsoft’s Windows Media Player
• Downloaded songs should be compatible with any iPod, Zune or other MP3 player or device
• You should be able to burn downloaded songs to CD if you want
• At this time, I believe that only EMI and Universal are offering MP3
• DRM-free is not a license to scatter them far and wide across the Internet. When you buy, you agree to terms and conditions governing the use of this music.
• Of course, you can’t get a refund on an MP3 after you download it
• Amazon gives you a free sample song - Energy, by The Apples In Stereo - in order to try out the downloader
• On my test download, Amazon’s MP3 Installer downloaded the file and installed it into iTunes without any interruption in what I was currently listening to
• It appears that you cannot re-download a song once you’ve downloaded it (you can with the free song - because it’s free)

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NBC and Amazon have made the pilot episodes for NBC’s new series “The Bionic Woman”, “Chuck”, “Life” and “Journeyman” available for free download. By free download, you can download them to a Windows PC and watch them on it or on TV via the TV out on your computer - or you can download them to your Series 2 Tivo (I don’t think they have Series 3 support yet). Links to the shows and an explanation of how to get them on your Tivo (it’s easy and it’s officially supported, no hackery involved) are after the cut.

NBC recently had a well-publicized kerfluffle with Apple over the iTunes Store, resulting in NBC deciding not to renew their contract to carry their TV shows on iTunes. Given that Apple can’t guarantee that those shows will be available for the whole season, they’ve decided not to offer any of NBC’s new fall programming (they wouldn’t be able to offer season subscriptions to shows).

There’s a lot of finger pointing. NBC says that Apple was inflexible in its pricing. Apple says that NBC wanted to raise the price on shows and wanted them to try to detect and prohibit pirated video and music from being loaded on iPods (which I can see no reasonable technical way to do other than requiring everything to be authenticate and DRM’ed, which is definitely well beyond “reasonable”).

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Amazon’s trying really hard to get your Harry Potter business. The final book of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is out in a little over a week. As usual, bookstores are planning midnight parties on Friday night, July 20th, to celebrate the release of the book.

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Though it’s not as good as having it in your hot little hands, you can now preorder the next version of MacOS X 10.5 (”Leopard”) from Amazon.com. Follow that link to see their page on it. Leopard is due out “in October” with a list price of $129.

Leopard comes in the regular flavor and, for the scrupulously honest of you out there, in a family pack that includes a license to use it on multiple machines (last time around it was five machines I believe but the description doesn’t say how many this time). The family pack is priced at $199.

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