Slashdot Mirror
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."
Looking at the situation, I would say that the message about it being Apples fault is a canned response to people asking about playback on the iPad that got miss-routed as a response to this new issue with the PlayBook. I suspect that Amazon does not know why its not working on the PlayBook, or at least does not have a fix. I also would not be shocked if they did not fix it as the PlayBook seems like a dead platform from a development standpoint. 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.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I think the user is doesn't understand the phrase "does not support" This does not mean Amazon is blocking the device. I means they don't test their service on Playbooks and don't fix bugs that occur on Playbooks. The error message is "Playback Error: Sorry we were unable to stream the video. This is likely because your Flash Player needs to be updated." That doesn't look like the message they would return if they were blocking the device.