Otaku Crave

Amazon Unbox Service Offering Some Free Anime Episodes

To promote its expanded selection of anime titles, the Amazon Unbox digital video service is offering the first episodes of selected series for free. Those series include Afro Samurai, Astro Boy, Basilisk, Bleach, Death Note, Naruto, Samurai 7, and Street Fighter II V It is also offering discounts on full seasons of some titles for a limited time. The service now features titles from Bandai Entertainment, Funimation, Manga Entertainment (Starz) and Viz Media. The Unbox service requires a personal computer with the Microsoft Windows XP SP2 or Vista operating system, or a TiVo Series2 or Series3 digital video recorder.

Other online services that offer authorized, downloadable anime videos in North America include ADVFilms.com, Apples Itunes Store, Bit Torrent (on the official website), IGN’s Direct2Drive, Microsoft’s Xbox Live Marketplace, Totalvid, Vuze (formerly known as Azureus), and ZVUE.