Amazon Unbox

» see amazon.com/unbox as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Unbox's two years overlap almost exactly with my first real broadband line, ttnet adsl from around 2006, but the store would not sell to me and was never going to. It was United States only, tied to a US billing address, and built on windows media DRM at a moment when the legal way to buy a film in turkey was to walk into a shop and buy a disc. What follows is a service i watched from the outside, which is how most of the world experienced american digital video for another decade.

It launched on 7 september 2006, five days before Apple put movies into the iTunes Store. The proposition was thousands of films from more than thirty studios, at DVD quality, for download. Walmart had gone first that february with something worse. Amazon's version was the serious attempt, because Amazon already had everybody's card details and everybody's rental history from the DVD business.

The catch was that you had to install a program. The Amazon Unbox Video Player was a windows-only application, and the file that came down was a WMV wrapped in microsoft DRM, or an.amzn file for a portable device. Nothing about that worked on a mac. Nothing about it worked on an iPod, which in september 2006 was the device most people who wanted video on the move actually owned.

~ the case file ~

~ the terms ~

Cory Doctorow read the license in the launch week and wrote it up on Boing Boing under a headline i am not going to reproduce. His point was straightforward. Buying an Unbox download bought you dramatically less than buying the DVD from the same website did, and the page did not go out of its way to tell you so.

The actual limits: a purchased film could live on two computers, each of which could sync to one portable device. A rental gave you thirty days to press play and twenty four hours to finish once you had. If the DRM license broke, and microsoft's DRM licenses broke often enough that fixing one service could void another, the file you had paid for became a few gigabytes of nothing. This was the argument the whole PlaysForSure era lost, and it lost it against people who had already worked out that an unprotected file does not do that.

~ the tivo year ~

The one genuinely good idea was the box. TiVo and Amazon announced Unbox on TiVo in february 2007 and it went live on 8 march, putting a download store inside a set-top recorder that 1.5 million broadband subscribers already had under the television. You bought on the website at your desk and the film appeared on the recorder downstairs. For 2007 that was close to magic, and it is the exact shape of every living-room video service since.

It still had the download problem. You bought a film and then waited, sometimes for hours, before it was watchable. The whole design assumed that streaming a DVD-quality picture over an american home connection was not realistic, and for most of 2006 that assumption was correct. It stopped being correct very quickly.

~ how it ended ~

On 4 september 2008 Amazon relaunched the service as Amazon Video On Demand. It played in the browser and started in seconds. The name Unbox went away without a farewell post. What killed the download store was not a competitor. It was flash video and enough bandwidth, the same pair that had already taken YouTube from a curiosity to the default.

The lineage kept moving. Video On Demand became Amazon Instant Video on 22 february 2011, with five thousand titles folded into Prime, and Instant Video eventually became Prime Video. So the service is not gone in the way most graves here are gone. What is gone is the specific thing Unbox was: a store that sold you a file and a separate program that decided which two machines were allowed to open it.

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