30 Days Without Cable: Amazon Unbox
Something interesting I hadn’t realized before starting this experiment: getting rid of TV means altering my daily habits. It’s so ingrained in me to come home, turn on my computer, and turn on the TV (as background noise).
I guess, technically I could still do that, but instead put on a DVD. I feel like watching anything that’s stored on my TiVo would be cheating, though, so that’s out (so much for my TiVo’d South Park collection). Well, until they are serving up RSS feeds and internet content (I saw this demo’d at CES).
But what I really need is an AppleTV…
I am sadly AppleTVless for the time being, so instead I decided to check out Amazon Unbox.
Unfortunately, we got off to a bad start that only got worse. Unbox, while compatible with TiVo (you can directly download to your TiVo, which is pretty cool), is only compatible with Windows XP/Vista. In the past 6 months, I’ve become a Mac girl. Thankfully, I still need XP Pro for work and have Parallels installed. Not ideal, but I can still install Unbox.
The install went smoothly, and after I remembered my password for Amazon, was logged in and my free download of the pilot for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles hit the queue.
Amazon’s Unbox FAQ told me I could start watching the episode almost right away thanks to their “progressive download feature”. Sure, why not. Except I got an error message telling me to try again later, and if I continued to receive the message, to contact Amazon support and cite the error code. OK, I’ll try again later.
Even after the video had completely downloaded I still got the same error message whenever I hit play. So much for Terminator. I decided to try another (free) video: Inside Battlestar Galactica. This time I decided to wait until it had completely downloaded to try playing it. But no… more of the same. I put an email in with their customer service and am waiting to hear back.
Well, I guess it’s YouTube for me tonight…
