When Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) launched its "unbox" video download service many months ago, it immediately attracted negative responses from the customer community as well as market watchers. It seems that Amazon.com was not immune to the severe restrictions that movie studios place on content to prevent massive pilfering -- and anger legit customers at the same time. The *huge* downside to this is that normal customers will rarely use the service since it is so frustrating and inflexible -- and to a point, this is what has happened to Amazon.com's vaunted "unbox" service.

However, the world's largest online retailer will now be trying to offset its earlier lousy service by letting customers buy or rent movies and television shows -- and then download them directly to some TiVo Inc. digital video recorders. OK -- this sounds like a service that more customers could get in line for and support. TiVo recorders are so incredibly simple to use -- and, umm, are actually connected to a primary viewing device like a television. As a result, this new service may stand a chance at becoming quite popular ouside of the geekdom of Slingboxes and other devices that are not nearly as popular as the digital video recorder (DVR). At least, not at this time, anyway.

What a novel concept -- give customers what they are hungering for and make the process as easy and as foolproof as possible. In case you didn't notice, this is what Apple did over five years ago with its iPod. Are there parallels here? Not sure if that is the most appropriate statement, but you never know.