I like Amazon Unbox

Since the Stargate series came off of hiatus, I've been enjoying the last season of "SG-1" and the third season of "Atlantis". Because of my cable woes, I haven't had access to the SciFi Channel for a while and I would regularly purchase "Galactica" episodes via iTunes. My plan was to do the same with the Stargate series.

Unfortunately, the iTunes Store has been very slow in uploading the new episodes and it got to the point where the store was falling behind as new episodes came out. In order to stay caught up, I began looking for other sources.

Some months ago, Amazon Unbox advertised their integration with Tivo devices. The gist is that you can buy the digital downloads on Amazon and they are automatically downloaded to the Tivo. It isn't an instant process, but it happens within a few hours.

Last week, I went ahead and purchased the shows on Amazon instead of iTunes. I arrived home and found that the episodes were on my Tivo and in pretty good quality. I didn't need to put them on the iPod and hook that up - everything worked well out of the box with my existing setup. I was very pleased and over the weekend, I ordered the latest episodes from Amazon.

I've been very satisfied with my experience and I'll probably continue using Amazon to watch the rest of the Stargate episodes. The only downside to the service is that the episodes cannot be transferred to other Tivos or to other devices. However, Amazon keeps track of the episodes seen and I believe that you can download them again, if need be. Since I plan on getting the Stargate episodes on DVD (to complete my collection), this isn't the worst thing in the world.

So, consider this post a hearty endorsement of Amazon's service.