I decided I’d watch The Longest Day tonight, so I went to my shelves to get the DVD. I have my DVDs arranged more or less by genre, alphabetically. (They’re pretty messy right now, though.) Let’s see. There’s Lawrence of Ariabia, Memphis Belle… Wait a minute. That one starts with an ‘M’. No gap between them. Somehow I seem to have not bought The Longest Day. WTFO? So I’ve ordered the two-disc edition from Amazon. I received the normal order confirmation email, and also another email telling me that I have a free ‘rental’ of the film I can watch right now. I have 30 days to watch it, and have 24 hours to watch it once I start watching it.
I was still working at Amazon when they unveiled this as Unbox in 2006. I was in a different department working in production on demand (we produced books and dvds after a customer ordered them). I didn’t have fast enough internet at home to really try it out.
Their Video on Demand is fairly powerful, but not their most well known feature.
I use it on occasion, and it works well. I have a Tivo and Netflix, and still, sometimes the movie/show I want to watch is not available on Netflix instant watch, and I want it RIGHT NOW, don’t want to wait for a disk to come. That’s when Amazon Video on Demand is great.
It also sucks me in on TV series. I might start out renting a disc of, say, “Breaking Bad” but then I get to the end of disc 2, and I want to watch just one more episode tonight… and there’s Amazon, beckoning me with Video On Demand. I’ve done that way more times than I care to admit.
I also got my mother hooked on it. She refuses to get Netflix for some reason (I think she’d love it, but she just has a mental block) but I don’t think she’s rented a video from a store since I told her about Amazon Video on Demand. She loves it.