Earlier in the month, I mentioned how Amazon had released their movie downloading service called Unbox. Just from reading about it, I had thought the restrictions far outweighed the little advantages with overly large downloads that take hours, a sketchy piece of software that's required to play each video, as well as a few other hurdles.
A few days ago, Fortune's Peter Lewis tested Amazon's Unbox service and wrote an excellent review. I think the article can pretty much be summed up with this quote:
Of all the smart and talented people at Amazon, did no one dare say, "Wait, our new service bites! It's slower than a trip to Blockbuster, more expensive than a DVD, absurdly restrictive on how the consumer uses the movie, delivers lower resolution than a DVD, and requires running a cable from the PC to the TV if you want to watch the movie on something larger than a PC monitor"?
I particularly enjoyed the part where Peter started downloading a movie and discussed how it took 5 hours on his 5 megabit connection - the time it would take him to drive to a far away Blockbuster to rent the DVD and then spend a few hours at the shopping mall.