This weekend marks the return of real sales to Amazon Unbox. There are five titles being offered as $1.99 rentals: The Bank Job, Vantage Point, Definitely, Maybe, Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (Unrated), and My Mom’s New Boyfriend.

Also, The Summer Movie Sale continues to run, labeled the Labor Day Movie Sale this week. There are 56 titles available to purchase (not rent) for just $5.99. OK, for some inexplicable, freaky reason Leonard Part 6 is in there for $9.94.

Not much on offer from Amazon Unbox this weekend. Nothing by way of the normal discounted rentals, but if you’re into football they have a selection of twenty NFL highlight clips available for free.

And The Summer Movie Sale is still rolling on. Purchase, not rent, any of 56 titles for $5.99 each.

Amazon Unbox seems to be skipping the usual weekend sale this week. There don’t appear to be any discounted rentals available.

But there is one bright spot, The Summer Movie Sale is still running. The sale offers titles for purchase, not rental, for $5.99 each. There are currently twenty titles in the sale. Once again they’re calling it a Teen Comedy Sale this week, and once again it is really teen comedies and cheesy action movies.

This weekend the Amazon Unbox sale is back with $1.99 rentals. There are five titles on offer: Vantage Point, Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (Unrated), In Bruges, Drillbit Taylor, and The Other Boleyn Girl.

The Summer Movie Sale is also still rolling, this week it is a Teen Comedy Sale with 18 titles to purchase at $5.99 each. It actually looks more like ‘Teen Comedy and Cheesy Action Movie Sale’, really.

They may not be ebony and ivory, but as I’ve said in the past, Blu-ray and video downloads can live together in perfect harmony. When I see people saying things like ‘Blu-ray is DOA’ because downloads will kill it, I tend to either snicker or roll my eyes, or both. Because, while I agree that someday downloads will probably kill off physical media, that day is years away. Many years. People point to music download services, like iTunes, as an example - and I’ll point out that the vast majority of music is still sold on physical media, and downloads have a long way to go before they kill CD. (I buy all of my music via download, CD is a last resort.) And video downloads are many times the size of music downloads.

With video downloads it is always a compromise between speed and quality. For instant gratification you have streaming video, but that’s the lowest quality. Broadband speed limitations restrict the maximum possible streaming bitrates. Downloads can offer higher bitrates, but still require fat pipes to be feasible, and, of course, storage. But even the best download services don’t come close to matching the picture quality of Blu-ray, because they can’t match the bitrates. And don’t even get into bonus features, lossless audio (Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD-MA), multiple audio and subtitle tracks, etc. With most commercial Blu-ray titles using between 30GB or more of disc capacity, we’re not going to be downloading content at that quality in the near future.

So I was a little gratified to see this article in CE Pro, entitled Blu-ray and Downloads: Why Both Are Worth Offering. CE Pro is an industry magazine with a primary audience of consumer electronics professionals, the kind of folks who install custom systems in high end homes. The article focuses on Blu-ray for physical media and VUDU for downloads, but Amazon Unbox on TiVo, iTunes on Apple TV, Xbox 360, PlayStation3, NetFlix, etc, are all possible broadband video options for the consumer. Downloads aren’t about to replace discs for those who prefer a quality viewing experience, but downloads offer the kind of instant gratification that discs can’t match. I think having both available is the best approach, the best of both worlds.

This weekend Amazon Unbox isn’t really offering much. No 99-cent rentals this time around. The only deal appears to be the $5.99 Summer Movie Sale, with 14 titles for purchase at $5.99 each.

This time around Amazon Unbox has three deals on offer. First we once again have Summer Classics to rent for $0.99: The Passenger, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Special Edition), Hawaii, The Way We Were, Bananas, and Rocky.

They’re also offering $1 off three films: The Onion Movie for $2.99, Batman Begins for $1.99, and 27 Dresses for $2.99.

And, finally, we have a Summer Movie Sale. 14 films to purchase, not rent, for $5.99 each: Snatch, Layer Cake, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, XXX, The Glass House, The Big Hit, Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle, The Devil’s Own, Donnie Brasco, The Quick and the Dead, Stealth, Desperate Measures, Cliffhanger, and Still Crazy.

And as a special deal, you can buy both Charlie’s Angels and Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle for a combined price of only $10.99 - you buy Charlie’s Angels for $9.99, and then receive a code to purchase Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle for just $1. Details here.

As a side note, I thought I’d mention that The Ultimate Matrix Collection on Blu-ray is now available for pre-order. That’s a seven disc set - five BDs (The three live-action movies, The Animatrix, and ‘The Matrix Experience’) and two DVDs of bonus material. All for $90.95.