Amazon's Unbox and Apple's iTunes movie downloads not yet successful

Filed in archive Business Trends on October 14, 2006

other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the theater?

Tsk, tsk, tsk. It appears that Amazon.com's Unbox and Apple's iTunes are just not delivering the goods when it comes to movie downloads. A month after both services debuted neither is producing great results. This is not the path one wants to take if you are to change how the world watches movies.


While consumers will spend $650 Million for 780 million music downloads this year, the market for movie downloads is nearer $50 million.

Buying an iTunes movie requires upgrading to iTunes 7, but I recently learned that older computers may not have all the features iTunes 7 needs to work. Apple says Mac customers should be sure they have the latest versions of both iTunes and the QuickTime software it uses.

Amazon.com has had to placate consumers with refunds after some couldn't get the service to work. Customers of both services are reporting problems downloading the software on their machines and complaining of seemingly interminable download times, sometimes in excess of several hours. Picture quality and equipment requirements also are stumbling blocks.

When a consumer does get everything right, they can often bump into long download times or learn what it means first hand to have to store a 2 gigabyte file on their laptop.