Similar to the Apple launch of movies in the iTunes store, last week Amazon launched their Unbox Video Downloads, where you can purchase or rent TV show episodes, or entire movies, even offering a free television show episode for you to try it — or $1.99 off a movie.  (First time’s always free…)

I decided to try it today, and I’m less then impressed.  The client that’s required to download will not install on Windows Vista:  It requires XP SP2, or Windows Server 2003.  So I booted up the Dell notebook with XPSP2 and it installs, but it doesn’t see the episode that I purchase.  I wrote them a rather curt message to let them know of my experience, but either way it was a frustrating exercise.

[Three hours later:] I’m not sure if it was because I was low on disk space (I had a gig left, but apparently that wasn’t enough), or it was just slow in picking up the purchase, but after I cleared off some space on the hard drive, it automatically detected it had enough space and started downloading.  Very nice.  Still, that initial user experience wasn’t great.  Also, as a note, I thought I had closed it, when it instead went to the System tray.  Sneaky.

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 @ 1:03 pm ,
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