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Unbox Too Restricted and Too Expensive?
abb_road writes "Businessweek takes a first look at Amazon's new video service and walks away unimpressed. Between the high cost of downloads, the sometimes-poor video quality and the restrictions required by movie studios, they're not predicting a huge hit. From the article: 'Amazon finally launched its long-awaited online video service on Sept. 7. But it's no sure thing that it will catch on with the masses. The service, called Amazon Unbox, offers downloads of movies and television shows, as well as digital movie rentals. But like all its rivals, it's shackled by a raft of viewing limitations imposed by movie studios.'"
Of course the idiots running the movies studios are half the problem - but the other half of the problem are the idiots running Apple, Microsoft and other monpolistic enterprises. The VC-1 video from Microsoft sucks badly while Apple's + DIVX+ Xvid MPEG-4/H.264 suck almost as badly as VC-1. Here's a quote from a comparative research piece - notice that Apple and other companies compressed their own videos for the study:
RealVideo Best Video Codec, Followed by Apple's H.264, Flash and Windows Media, Says New Report from StreamingMedia.com
The reports provide an objective counterbalance to the hyperbole coming from both the Flash and H.264 camps. One of the key findings from the Proprietary report, for example, was that the quality of the best Flash and H.264 codecs still trailed RealVideo, often by a significant margin.
"While the progress of H.264 and Flash codecs has been impressive," quipped report author Jan Ozer, "rumors of the demise of all other codecs have been greatly exaggerated."
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To research the reports, Ozer produced a 6-minute test file composed of 38 scenes representing typical business, sports, and entertainment videos, along with several animations and still image pans and zooms. The reports analyzed video quality in up to five configurations--modem, 3GPP, 100 Kbps, 300 Kbps and 500 Kbps--and compared frame quality, temporal and color quality, and playback smoothness. Buyers can download all videos and still image files used in the analysis, along with a convenient interface for viewing the video files and still images.
Proprietary Codecs, 2006
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Beyond the depth and scope of the analysis, the Proprietary report has several unique aspects. For example, the files used to compare the technologies were encoded by Apple, Microsoft, and RealNetworks to ensure optimal quality. The report also compared the quality of prominent encoding tools such as Autodesk Cleaner XL, Canopus ProCoder, and Sorenson Squeeze, finding a significant disparity between the tools.
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In addition to Real's superior quality, the report found that Windows Media had started to fall behind.
"With Microsoft's recent success in standards bodies, we expected quality to be at or near the top," commented Ozer, "but usually it was at or near the bottom. Companies using or considering Windows Media really need to evaluate other technologies."
(Is that why Waggoner and other Microsoft employees are hanging out with the "pirates" at Doom9, trying to convince the "pirates" that VC1 isn't as bad as it seems?)
The second report, "Flash Codecs, 2006" compared different companies' Flash Video offerings. StreamingMedia.com concluded that On2's VP6 codec came out on top when compared to Wildform and Sorenson Spark, but that "there are no one-size-fits-all solutions for Flash producers," according to Ozer.
http://www.streamingmedia.com/press/view.asp?id= 4336