Amazon Blocks Video Streaming On BlackBerry Tablet, Blames Apple

AZA43 writes "Amazon.com has blocked its Instant Video streaming service on BlackBerry PlayBook tablets, in an apparent effort to make its Kindle Fire device more attractive to tablet buyers. And it says Apple is the reason why it blocked the service. But the company hasn't blocked comparable Android tablets from streaming Instant Video, and Android tablets hold a much larger portion of the overall tablet market than PlayBooks. Amazon will likely succeed only in alienating customer with PlayBooks who have already purchased lots of streaming video content."

Comments

Awful "journalism", the story is almost certainly

[squiggleslash]

OK, this doesn't smell right. This allegation is based upon one email from customer service, and given the context it's even quite possible that "Apple" (mentioned once in the message) was a brainfart with the customer service agent intending to write "Adobe". Lest anyone think I'm grasping at straws, the entire email makes no sense whatsoever if taken literally (as it kind of implies Apple wrote Flash!), but makes perfect sense if you read "Apple" as "Adobe".

After waiting less than a day for confirmation from Amazon the author of the article decides to go ahead and make the claim despite the somewhat dubious circumstances. I don't believe it for a second, and I think the author's an idiot.

You don't buy online streaming content

[Ralph Spoilsport]

You buy ACCESS to data, and the moment the supplier doesn't like you, some obscure line in the EULA is found and used to deny the User ACCESS to the Data. But the user never actually owns the Data, in that the data is resident on machines of their possession.

Yoda by written the subject line was

[x1r8a3k]

Also, from the email, it seems not to be "We won't support your Playbook because we're mean" but "We cant support it because of licensing issues."

Which makes the blog author look even more like a "I spend money at your store, how dare you not support X" over-reactionary.

Re:Yoda by written the subject line was

[squiggleslash]

The author is asserting that Amazon.com, on the basis of one CSR email that doesn't make sense, has deliberately decided to prevent its videos from running on the Playbook.

BTW, the situation gets even more obvious when he explains what happens. The video starts to play, and then the player crashes out with a generic error about requiring a Flash upgrade. Does that sound like how it would act if Amazon had told its developers to stop allowing Playbook users access to Amazon's Video?

It's fairly obvious what's going on here. The Blackberry version of Flash is broken. Amazon can't support that. Amazon's CSR, in a garbled way, tried to point the finger at Adobe, or Apple, or someone who he thinks is responsible for the player in the Blackberry. Rather than wait for an communication from Amazon.com, the author went off half-cocked with a far fetched conspiracy theory that in an effort to improve Kindle Fire sales, Amazon.com found the tablet platform that's got the smallest market share, and banned them from using Amazon Prime Video.

As Bugs Bunny would say, "What a maroon."

Re:Blocked PlayBooks?

[metalgamer84]

Total Playbook activations are closer to the 1M mark actually...

Re:Occam's razor...

[JRonin]

"Lets remember that a PlayBook native player would require dedicated development time since the whole Android apps on PlayBook thing never really panned out. Coupled with the out of date flash player, there's not a lot Amazon can do." People really should do some basic research before posting. The next major version of the PlayBook OS, 2.0, comes out next week. It includes the Android VM & the response from Android developers has reportedly been positive. The author also made it clear that he was able to stream video using older flash players on other tablets, so that excuse doesn't cut it either.

Re:What, all 3 of them?

[Straif]

If you install the 2.0 OS beta (or wait a couple weeks for the full release) you can have full email, contact and calendar apps which includes integration with other social networks like Twitter and Linkedin.

As for Android apps, with OS 2.0 you can sideload almost anything right now. You can also load the Marketplace directly onto a cracked playbook but that tends to have extremely unstable results. For new apps you don't even need to develop specifically for the Blackberry OS, the compiler translates most Android library calls for you so you simply compile your Android app twice and then list it directly in the BB Appworld. There's at least one Andorid market in the process of doing this right now for their entire library.

I picked up a playbook just before Christmas (it's the only BB device I own) and barely put it down the entire holiday season. It was hooked up to my parents TV for almost the entire 3 weeks I was visiting, streaming whatever I had downloaded or copied to it, and when my brother or nephews wanted to watch something I didn't I could still stream it and continue playing Angry Birds or read a ebook. I'm still using it every day. It's the perfect size to just lay down on and end table and grab to play a quick game of Monopoly or search for some useless tidbit of information.

My 66 year old mother loved hers and still comments on it whenever I'm talking to her. I just wish I didn't who her how easy the video chat was to use.