Amazon Unbox, Apple next?

Yesterday, Amazon the great internet retailer announced the availability of downloadable movies from its online store. Branded Amazon Unbox, the service is the first of a likely raft of major offerings over the next few months, with the most highly speculated version coming from the owner of the iPod brand, Apple.

Many companies have ‘played’ with download for some time, but none have yet been able to unleash the full force of massive video catalogues onto the market until yesterday. Sure Apple announced and has made certain online movies available for some time, but it hasn’t yet announced a wide ranging catalogue, and anyway the current iPods are just too small to want to watch Stars Wars on for example.

We discussed the idea a few months ago that until, either a full screen download was available for connecting to the TV/Plasma, or  someone got their act together and shipped a usable bigger screen player, that things would be slow to take off.

Amazon changes this and moves things to the next stage. For the first time a company with a massive customer base will make available a large portfolio of products to download and watch.

So where’s the catch? Well first it’s Windows XP only solution, sorry Apple fans. Second its based on a proprietary player from Amazon – yes that well known developer of consumer software! Third, it will only play on a limited number of portable devices (the Creative Zen is the only device we know at this time).

Of course, this is really a teaser for the main event, there is massive speculation in the press and across the internet that Apple will announce something similar on 12th September. Apple is much better placed to compete with Amazon as it has already established the iTunes and iPod brand in the minds of consumers. Of course Apple will need to release a new video iPod at the same time in order to create a huge splash.

Whilst the Amazon Unbox product shows that Hollywood is now prepared for internet movies, we speculate that the Amazon offering is flawed and is unlikely to succeed in competition with Apple and then later Microsoft. It cannot compete with the retail presence that Apple has and it’s not in the position to dictate standards. Both Apple and Microsoft will succeed in both areas. We doubt WalMart will be stocking up on Amazon players anytime soon.

Of course the other argument is that ‘its the PC dummy’ – well we really don’t buy that Amazon has anything that with dramatically change the PC as media player experience, short clips are OK, but people want to sit back and relax when watching a movie – again Amazon just doesn’t has the hardware or software experience to make a difference, even Apple and Microsoft are struggling here.

So the Amazon offering is a great ‘stake in the ground’ but unless Microsoft or Apple licence a DRM to them we think that they’ll continue to do better business shipping hard copy DVD’s to customer for the foreseeable future.

The good news, though, is that the Genie is definitely out of the bottle.

Further  reading … Will Apple or Sony ever get portable video off the ground?