14 DAY TRIAL // After Apple's announcement last week, Amazon quickly followed with an announcement about their Unbox movie service. At that time, it was enthusiastically greeted, but now, after people have actually used it, the reaction is far from it.
Firstly, the Unbox player is an interesting piece of software, the kind that gets under your skin. It installs a new version of .NET, without the user's consent during the installation phase and it sets itself to be launched at startup, with no option within to disable this behavior. Those who have tried to stop it from launching itself at startup have noticed that even if they use msconfig to stop it, it will still try to connect to the Internet, via a Windows service called ADVWindowsClientService.exe at ever boot. More amusingly, when you try to uninstall it, you are greeted with a login screen. That is, you cannot uninstall it until you authenticate with your Amazon account.
Talk about being intrusive, but even so, some might have been willing to put up with it if it worked, but even in that department there are problems.
Tom Merritt from CNET had issues getting a file to play properly. Not even after it downloaded fully did it work, neither in the Amazon player nor the regular Windows Media Player. Eventually, he found out that dragging the progress bar to a little after the start of the file would kick-start the playback. Similarly, Michael Gartenberg from JupiterResearch found out that the Star Trek episode he bought could not be played. "Click, purchase, download and install player. Load player, it connects and then nothing. No download. No nothing. It shows but nothing happens. Fifteen minutes of nothing. I click troubleshoot. It tells me it's checking stuff like DRM. Everything checks out. Message pops up. You have used all licenses for this file. If you want to watch it on this PC, you need to purchase it again."
Not even a week gone by and people are already recommending that others stay away from Amazon's Unbox service. Usually 15 minutes of fame is a metaphor, but in this case, it represents the amount of time people were actually interested in using the service.