Looks like online movies are starting to heat up, Amazon just unvield their new movie download service, UnBox. At first glance, it doesn’t seem to be that compelling, since there seems to be some pretty heavy restrictions on what you can do with the movies you download. First of all, it’s just plain inconvenient. You can’t transfer your downloads between computers, you have to redownload the movie if you want to watch it on another computer. And you can only watch your movies on up to two computers. The real show stopper is you can’t even burn it to a regular DVD to play in your fancy home theater system. Since these videos are all encoded in Microsoft’s Windows Media format, you can’t play these movies on Macs, Linux, or anything not Windows Media certified (like the DVD player you have under your TV¹).

And the price doesn’t make much sense either. It costs $13.50 to download the movie Office Space, yet it costs $8 (plus approx $5 for shipping) for the same movie as a real life DVD. And the real life DVD doesn’t come with any of the previously mentioned restrictions! Tell me again how this movie download thing is a good deal?

However, where I can see this really taking off is if Amazon allowed people to download and watch a DVD they just purchased while they wait for it to ship to their homes. Instant gratification, and a better customer experience. I think this would be a really neat integration between digital and physical worlds, but I doubt movie studios would allow for this anytime soon.

The other player slated to launch a movie download store is Apple. This is something everybody knew was coming (since they already sell TV shows and short films), they just didn’t know when. They’re going to hold a special “Showtime” press conference next week, on Tues Sept 12 and while we don’t really know what they’re going to announce (it’s all rumors at this point), it seems like at least one of them is going to be downloadable movies. And as any proper Mac geek with a blog would do, here are my predictions for what they’ll announce this Tues:

• iTunes Movie Store: This seems to be pretty much fact now, with a number of sources confirming this rumor. The price point seems to be $9.99 for older movies and $14.99 for new releases. Eh, not that excited about this price (see above). But I really hope their implementation is not full of restrictions, like Amazon’s. The key thing would be if they allow people to burn movies to actual playable DVDs, kind of like how you can burn music purchased from iTunes to playable CDs.
• Airport Express with Video out: I think if Apple were to sell movies (and it looks like they are), then they’ll want to have some way to also deliver a movie like experience. That is, people should be able to view their downloaded movies in a nice home theater setup. This would basically be a normal Airport Express, but with the addition of a video out.
• iHome: If they don’t do an Airport Express w/ video, then they’ll probably want to do some thing along the lines of a media center computer or console. It’d sorta be like a Mac Mini, except it would have all the proper inputs and outputs and act as a hub in the home theater. I doubt this will happen, but it is an interesting possibility.
• iPod with widescreen touch display: Probably not, though it would be super cool. I think at best they’ll just increase the storage capacity for their existing iPods.

So there’s my predictions, what’s yours? Or maybe you just don’t care because you’re more of a PC guy…

¹ Which interestingly includes the Microsoft’s own XBox 360. As far as I know, you’ll need connect the 360 to a Windows Media Center PC (which does the decoding) if you want the 360 to play Windows Media videos.