I don’t watch much TV on my TV. I have a DVR but my wife is usually recording some reality TV show that I won’t watch. Now, we even have dual tuners in that sucker but who would know that America’s Next Top Model and Survivor would be on at the same time.
I feel in love with Itunes and it’s TV shows that you can purchase and download. What I don’t like is that Apple and NBC couldn’t negotiate contract that kept NBC shows on the wonderful Itunes service.
So when I got my Office Season 4 hankering, I went in search of other online places to get shows. I tried Miro but it was way too slow, I went on Joox.net but they didn’t have the latest episodes and then I found Amazon Unbox.
I actually like the service, sure it’s got the same DRM issues as Itunes but it has the NBC shows and it has a selection of music that is ALL in MP3 format.
The Amazon client, which handles the downloading and playing of the video files, totally sucks but you can play the TV shows with Windows Media Player as well. Why do I purchase TV shows that are shown for free on TV? Simply, my time is worth the $2 a show and really I’m watching them once and then never watching them again.
BoingBoing took Amazon to task over the EULA you sign when you sign-up for the service. Also, the music selection is less then stellar and you can’t purchase video or TV shows that can play on the iPhone/iPod platform. And as mentioned, the software client for Unbox is awful.
However, despite these issues, Unbox feed my impulse purchase hunger and I’ll most likely keep using it for TV shows… that I don’t find on Itunes.