Hot on the heels of contenders like the iTunes Music Store and Google Video, Amazon are reportedly working on a video store named Amazon Unbox. This is unconfirmed by Amazon, but a blogger recently got lucky and took screenshots of the service in action. At the moment the service looks like it will launch in the US, there’s no promising it will come to the UK or anywhere else and as it’s unconfirmed, no word if/when this service will go live.

The service looks like it’s going to feature a downloadable video player (which presumably uses some kind of DRM, and is Windows-only). The video player will presumably allow playback of purchased video and the homepage screenshot seems to reckon that the service will also allow TV and portable device playback.

Available in the store (from what I can read into the screenshots) will be Hollywood films, TV shows and archived sports events.

What’s also interesting is that we’ve got no way of knowing how exactly this content is going to be delivered. BitTorrent would be good technically, but unlikely because of legal issues, and standard web transfer (HTTP) is unlikely to be used because of inefficiency, insecurity and technical limitations with some files over 2 GB.
Considering the amount of work that appears to have gone into this service already, it’s unlikely just to be a passing idea by Amazon so it looks like, the US at least, are in for a new way to buy and download movies.