Unbox is Amazon.com's Movie and TV Show store, which offers downloadable videos that may be played on a user's PC, TiVo, or portable media player. The Unbox video player provides a "Shop" browser, a carousel of poster images for viewing top selling and renting movies and TV shows. Sadly, you have to make your purchase via the Amazon.com web site, and can't purchase directly from the player. You also cannot browse videos by genre in the player's Shop.

The player itself is simple to use. The tabs along the top allow the user to switch between their purchased video, video player, their devices, and the shop. A drop down panel shows download status and storage space available, which is a nice touch that I appreciated. The player itself provides play/pause, reverse/forward, stop, volume, running/total time, scrubber, and view modes.

This feels very much like a first release. I only used the Windows Video Player, so I cannot comment on the TiVo experience (DirectTV Tivo customers cannot participate). There are some shortcomings in the browsing process, a problem that the Roku also suffers form in its first release. Neither Unbox or Roku compares with the browsing offered by the Apple TV.

What I liked is mainly that there was a different catalog of titles—some of which aren't available on iTunes or Netflix's Watch Immediately Inventory. The prices are competitive and the standard video quality was fine.