The Dark Side of Amazon's New Pilots

I've been really, really excited about digital video distribution lately: first Netflix greenlights jms's return to science fiction TV, and then Amazon announces their new pilots. Perhaps the decade long dearth of any good television is nearing its end! So, with that in mind, I finished up editing Slashdot for the day and sat down to watch some of these new pilots. Only to discover that Amazon has taken away my ability to watch entirely in the name of Digital Restrictions Management.

For ages now, Amazon Instant Video has worked with Android devices supporting Flash and, more importantly to many people (and me) it seems, through an unofficial XBMC plugin. It seemed like Amazon was happily using RTMPE to prevent casual stream interception, at least for content funded by others. But with the release of their new pilots, they enabled "Flash Access," Adobe's DRM that (for now) is actually effective.

This effectively kills access for everyone using GNU/Linux, even with the (officially unsupported) Adobe Flash plugin! The Adobe plugin relies on HAL for some DRM magic, but HAL is unmaintained, deprecated, and was removed from most major distros ages ago. You can't even install it by hand thanks to udev removing a few features HAL relied upon. Naturally, the Adobe Flash plugin is equally unmaintained so there is little hope even for people willing to install a piece of unmaintained software with a history of remotely exploitable security holes, instability, and poor performance.

But it seems the loss of access from XBMC is more widely felt: RMS cultists and pragmatic Windows users alike now suffer equally. And the folks who aren't GNU/Hippies with an anti-cloud-chip-on-their-shoulder might even be suffering more: they've lost access to shows and movies that they purchased.

There are a dozen pages on the XBMC forum of people pretty pissed, hundreds of angry posts on their Facebook wall, lengthy threads on Amazon's official forums. But so far the response from Amazon has simply been: it was never supposed to work, and we've fixed it.

In the absence of a clear response from Amazon, wild speculations as to why they decided to institute DRM abound: it's not intentional, piracy is a problem for them after all, Jeff Bezos personally wants to eat every XBMC user's cat, or it has something to do with those pilots.

I'd wager it had something to do with the pilots, or was somewhat unintentional (maybe they only meant to restrict HD content).

An XBMC forum member claims to have chatted with a support representative and gotten a suggestive answer:

Amazon Support: Okay, for Android devices we unfortunately don't support them except for the Kindle Fires so it was really lucky your phone was able to play our instant videos before. As to why they aren't working now, we just recently updated our Flash video playback support which is more than likely why it won't play now. I'm really sorry for any inconvenience this will cause you!
Me: I see. Was the flash video playback updated because of the new Amazon Original Pilots that was released recently?
Amazon Support:I'm honestly not sure if it was due to the pilots that came out, though the timing with the pilots and the update can't be coincidental :-)

Assuming it's not just a technical glitch (it happened once before, and Amazon turned the harder-to-break DRM off) and related to the pilots, why only now have they enabled proper DRM? Surely if content they fund is worth restricting then all content is worth restricting? After all, the party line has always been that DRM is imposed by those evil card carrying MPAA members, and not by enlightened tech companies who are just doing what has to be done to free us from the tyranny of broadcast television.

Is it that the content they already provide is widely available through piracy that they haven't cared before? Perhaps; stream ripping from Amazon/Netflix/Hulu and transforming it into a shareable form is not something a normal person would do if only because the video is streamed in mostly real-time. But there are entire groups dedicated to capturing television and uploading it, so someone out there would probably do it.

The problem is that they are going to break the DRM and pirate everything anyway. In fact. they already have (possibly nsfw, because piracy). The same goes for Netflix; their onerous DRM did nothing to stop piracy of House of Cards (finding it is left as an exercise for the reader, but Knuth would rate it 00), and yet they just posted incredible financial results and strong subscriber growth (in utter contrast to this time last year).

The cat's out of the bag: a good chunk of the world population own Infinite Copying Machines and those machines are networked. You cannot stop a determined individual from making a freely copyable version of anything digital unless you ban all output devices (certainly would make Haskell programming nicer) and burn every camera and piece of audio equipment ever built.

It seems that the same toxic thinking about distribution control that pervades the traditional networks has infected the online distributors. It's clear that torrent trackers offer something the traditional channels do not: (mostly) effortless access to content how and when you want it. But these are things that Netflix, Amazon, et al could offer as well... that they do offer. However, instead of liberalizing distribution as time goes on, the New Distributors have fallen into the same clearly failed mentality about restricting distribution that led to the entire media industry becoming a former shell of itself in a mere five years!

This mentality will only lead to failure. Pursuit of it is insanity: we are witnessing the end stages of an industry-wide collapse because of it! And it seems these new distributors have quickly forgotten that it was only the desperation of their predecessors that they were even able to license what they have now.

So, Amazon, why do you insist upon flogging people who are yelling "Shut up and take my money!"?

Comments

Linux Workaround

[bit trollent]

Linux users can download compatible files here.

Re:Linux Workaround

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. Torrenting to the rescue yet again, and yet again the pirates have a BETTER product than the broken-by-design DRM crap.

Re:Linux Workaround

[houstonbofh]

But I don't want to. I Liked Amazon prime free streams. I Liked being able to stream "right now" and not have to wait an hour, and seed for a day or so... I Liked not having to see if I had space for the entire season while the seeding was good.


Most of all, I Liked telling fellow Linux users bitching about Netflix, "Just Use Amazon Prime, because they work with Linux." Glad I didn't "buy" anything and actually expect to have access to it later. When will they realize that the reluctance to streaming distribution is that We do not trust you to let us keep using the stuff we have paid for!

Re:Linux Workaround

[devent]

Regarding the first part: since when you have to seed for a day, or since when we have space problems with hard disks? Maybe if you got a netbook, tablet or notebook with 64GB SSD or something like that. IMHO if you can stream a video with HD quality you can download a video as fast from The Pirate Bay.

Re:Linux Workaround

[lgw]

What the fuck is XBMC?

TFS was terrible.

XBMC = Xbox Media Center, a home theater PC platform originally written for the X-Box, but now very cross-platform.

jms = J. Michael Straczynski, creater of Babalon 5, plus a bunch of really crappy spinoffs.

RMS = some smelly hippie.

HAL = Hardware Abstraction Layer

DRM = an important factor in the popularity of p2p media distribution.

Re:Linux Workaround

[mcelrath]

This is a good reason to have content production and distribution handled by different entities. Content producers are paranoid and afraid that everyone will abscond with their special little flower, while content distributors are overly liberal in distributing to as wide an audience as possible. It makes sense for these two groups to fight it out to decide what the best compromise of protection vs. distribution is.

Personally, I want compulsory licensing. Posessing or obtaining content would always be legal, and the question becomes who you're supposed to pay and how much (a non-discriminatory licensing fee). It turns the question into an economic one, instead of a criminal one. An entity distributing content without collecting the licensing fee could be sued, but only for an amount proportional to the licensing fees.

Re:Linux Workaround

[Minwee]

OIC.

Re:Linux Workaround

[houstonbofh]

Regarding the first part: since when you have to seed for a day, or since when we have space problems with hard disks? Maybe if you got a netbook, tablet or notebook with 64GB SSD or something like that. IMHO if you can stream a video with HD quality you can download a video as fast from The Pirate Bay.

Since download and upload are asymmetrical, you need to seed much longer than you download if you want a decent ratio. As for space... All hard drive eventually fill.

Re:Linux Workaround

[Libertarian001]

I thought HAL was a homicidal computer?

Re:Linux Workaround

[Anonymous Coward]

This is real life, not Hollywood.

Re:Linux Workaround

[isorox]

What the fuck is XBMC?

TFS was terrible.

XBMC = Xbox Media Center, a home theater PC platform originally written for the X-Box, but now very cross-platform.

jms = J. Michael Straczynski, creater of Babalon 5, plus a bunch of really crappy spinoffs.

RMS = some smelly hippie.

HAL = Hardware Abstraction Layer

DRM = an important factor in the popularity of p2p media distribution.

It's a sad day when slashdot readers need those explained.

Re:Linux Workaround

[mcelrath]

Who said it was a tax? Or that the government was involved? All I meant by "compulsory licensing" is that the owner of content would be legally obligated to grant possession and distribution to any entity that asks, for a fixed fee that is negotiated on a large scale (rather than a negotiated punitive damage in court). I'm imagining this would be privately administered, except that there has to be a law to get it started. E.g. imagine that everything on TPB was explicitly legal, and that TPB was tasked with collecting $1.50 for each movie...

Re:Linux Workaround

[hairyfeet]

Wow, way for Linux users to miss the fucking POINT of DRM. The DRM is NOT to stop piracy, its to make that Android device fucking useless to Joe and Jane average so they will buy a Kindle, duh!

I mean the way guys here talk you'd think that all these companies are so damned stupid they have never heard of TPB but I have news for ya, they already know about TPB, P2P, even USENET which you seem to think is off the radar but it ain't. The DRM has never and will never be for stopping the actual pirates, instead it real purpose is to make it just enough of a PITA that the corp can get you to do what they want.

But its really no different than how my ISP uses caps to keep me using their services over the other guy (Netflix counts, their PPV doesn't) because they know that for every user that will go through the hassle of finding the shit on TPB, risk getting a strike, download that shit, hope they don't get slapped by a cap, and watch the show there are gonna be 300+ that say "fuck that, that is too much work" and just buy a Kindle. That is the point, that is why they don't give a rat's ass about the 2% or whatever that are using Linux because you aren't giving them Kindle money so why SHOULD they give a shit about you, at the end of the day the DRM is doing exactly what its intended to do, raise sales of the Kindle.

Anyone want to bet we'll see a spike in Kindle sales for the next couple of quarters?

Re:Linux Workaround

[The Rizz]

jms = J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, plus a bunch of really crappy spinoffs.

The problem with the spinoffs is not that they were worse than the original B5. Go back and watch the original B5 pilot movie and first season - they're actually worse than the spinoffs. JMS just seems to take a little while to get a story going - watch the last 2 or 3 episodes of Crusade where plot was actually happening - you could see it getting better, and starting to get into the old B5 quality. Unfortunately, the show was axed before we even got to the end of S1 (which is typically where JMS's series get good - Jeremiah was mediocre until the end of S1, for example).

Re:Linux Workaround

[Chelloveck]

That's why most modern Linux distributions have deprecated it. A murder here, a murder there, and suddenly Linux doesn't look so good anymore.

Re:Linux Workaround

[Requiem18th]

Why should the government be involved at all in the distribution of media?

Fucking hypocrite. "Intellectual Properties" only exist because of governmental intervention. Without a government to make it illegal you can't prevent me from doing whatever I want with the information and hardware I payed for.

Even after introducing laws for copyrights and patents there's still the question of how long does the terms last and that affects the price. Term length is the only reason we have to pay licensing for modern stuff but not for Shakespeare.

The government is THE fundamental cog piece in the information economy, and if they can tell us what to do with our hardware, they for sure can tell you to how much you can charge for stuff.

Re:Linux Workaround

[JoeCommodore]

TFR was incomplete:

TFS = The F#$@ing Summary (I think)

PC = Personal Computer

p2p = Peer to Peer usually in refernece to file sharing

Re:Linux Workaround

[Rich0]

XBMC = Xbox Media Center, a home theater PC platform originally written for the X-Box, but now very cross-platform.

Indeed - though it might be worth mentioning that the one platform it no longer works on is the X-Box. :)

Re:Linux Workaround

[Rich0]

What the fuck is XBMC?

It stands for X-Box Media Center. It is a fairly popular media management/playing program that doesn't support the X-Box.

Re:Linux Workaround

[Asmor]

Actually, XBMC = XBMC. They changed their project's name a long time ago, since it was no longer exclusive (or even primarily) for Xboxes.

Sort of like how KFC is no longer short for Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Re:Linux Workaround

[cellocgw]

What the fuck is XBMC?

Not to be confused with SMBC.
Or XKCD.
Wait for it.

Re:Linux Workaround

[thewolfkin]

Yes, but what does it stand for?

as a side note i can't believe there's a website dedicated just to transcripts

Re:Linux Workaround

[elcano]

Or buy an iPad.

Re:Linux Workaround

[hairyfeet]

So you traded getting locked into Amazon for getting locked into a bunch even more controlling and who gouges on their hardware...congrats.

Frankly the better move would be to tell both of them to get fucked and if you can't watch it for free on the net fuck that show, not like there isn't more shows than you can ever watch, games than you can ever play, and music than you can ever listen to being offered for free right now on the web, right?.

Re:Linux Workaround

[elcano]

Who said I did any trade? I said that Amazon is stupidly coercing their customers into buying a Kindle or an iPad. This is completely ridiculous... Not supporting the OS that made the Kindle possible but decide to support the platform of their major content competitor. Amazon is not just an unethical leecher (OS leecher) but just plain stupid.

Re:Linux Workaround

[elcano]

BTW, I only use Nexus devices.

Re:Linux Workaround

[jedidiah]

So this is supposed to be about the new Amazon pilots on Prime?

This would be the those same pilots which I am running on my Linux box right now? I am at a loss to see what exactly the problem is supposed to be here.

This nonsense did caused me to give those pilots a second look ironically enough.

Re:Linux Workaround

[Dynedain]

I understood the term "compulsory licensing" to mean something akin to the UK's TV tax system, but what you described is something I could probably get behind.

However, your approach still requires a messy set of logistics to support it in practice. What you've described already exists for music (at least in the US) and is administered through ASCAP, a purely private entity. They're the party responsible fo rmaking sure royalties are collected from radio, to online streaming, to elevator music, and the moneys divided between the artist, producer, and distributor. It does add a lot of overhead and isn't very flexible in adapting to new uses and business models. Avoiding this mess of bureaucracy is partially why you see hybrid retailer/distributors (Amazon, Hulu, Netflix) working out direct licensing details to feature exclusive content.

I like your idea, I'm just not sure it would improve the overall situation.

Re:Linux Workaround

[Dynedain]

As currently enshrined in the law (at least in US), individual copyright violation is a Civil offense, not a Criminal offense. There is a difference. The various content industry lobbying groups are trying very hard to change that. This means it's effectively treated as a breach of contract, although a special case.

This is why every single copyright violation case has been Company X vs. Individuals X,Y,Z, instead of "The People of the State of A" vs. Individuals X,Y,Z.

Large-scale copyright violation is a different story, and is prosecuted as a criminal offense under laws meant for criminal organizations.

The government's involvement in copyright, content distribution, and compensation discussions should be limited to purely to setting a level playing field so that all content producers and distributors have equal opportunity to get into the market, and all consumers have equal access to services offered. The government should not be determining what is fair compensation rates, should not be defining the relationship structures, and should not be defining business models.

I don't want the government prosecuting contract violations, and I don't want the government building a bureaucracy to force a specific payment structure to corporate behemoths. I want passive governmental regulations, not an active role.

How is that hypocritical exactly?

Re:Linux Workaround

[mcelrath]

I'd rather fight about the details of implementation and bureaucracy than continue to allow content producers to completely block some uses, sue people over others, and charge exorbitant fees to those they don't like.

I'm thinking that with compulsory licensing (as I describe it), new business models would be enabled because they don't have to ask permission. It would just be their responsibility to pay the negotiated fee. (and they don't have to do any negotiation at all since it's set on a large scale -- renegotiated periodically by content owner and distributor stake-holders and not set by fiat by one or the other). There would be no "licensing deals", and e.g. movie studios wouldn't be able to discriminate against iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, or TPB.

Payment would mostly be by the honor system, using copyright registrations to figure out who to pay (imagine every file having a "copyright holder" hash in it somewhere that identifies who to pay). I'm sure content owners would use a trade organization (MPAA) to track down non-payers, but they wouldn't be able to sue for more than e.g. 3*(license fee) so no more grandmas with $100,000 bills for 2 songs, and it only would make sense for them to go after large distributors.

Imagine an app that takes a hash of each media file you have, looks it up in a central copyright database, and tells you how much it would cost to copy it all onto your friend's laptop, and it would all be legal. I don't want *enforced* drm-style payment, just decent and legal accounting...there are always exceptions and I don't want to re-buy all my music when my HDD crashes, nor do I want anyone's software to tell me whether what I'm doing is legal or not.

Re:Linux Workaround

[Dynedain]

Aside from your in-file technology, what you've described is exactly what currently happens with ASCAP. The problem is that since ASCAP is a slow moving entity, they don't understand new business models and technologies. For example, 1 play on radio != 1 play on a telephone hold system != 1 play in an elevator != 1 play on broadcast internet stream != 1 play on direct individual internet stream.

They try to price based on audience penetration and leave the business model up to the actual distributor, but their rates prevented various business models. Remember how many Shoutcast channels their used to be? (aka iTunes radio). Most of the independent ones completely dried up because ASCAPs rates only worked in favor of large radio stations. Independent distributors had no way to meet the revenue requirements to support the licensing. It didn't help that radio play (estimated audience size) was priced differently than internet streaming (accurate audience size).

Re:Linux Workaround

[Harik]

Why should the government be involved at all in the distribution of media?

I agree with you 100%, the government should absolutely get out of the distribution business. Naturally, that means repealing all copyright statutes entirely.

Re:Linux Workaround

[ClioCJS]

The pirate bay requires no ratio, and even at 3Mbps,. most of these shows can be had in less than 10 minutes. People who want streaming are impatient babies.

Re:Linux Workaround

[ClioCJS]

The pirate bay requires no ratio, and even at 3Mbps,. most of these shows can be had in less than 10 minutes. People who want streaming are impatient babies...

Re:Linux Workaround

[Requiem18th]

The government should not be determining what is fair compensation rates, should not be defining the relationship structures, and should not be defining business models.

I don't want the government prosecuting contract violations, and I don't want the government building a bureaucracy to force a specific payment structure to corporate behemoths. I want passive governmental regulations, not an active role.

How is that hypocritical exactly?

At the risk of feeding a troll I'll reply once. Copyrights are unnatural, they limit our natural rights to use our hardware as we please in the privacy of our own homes.

That's not the problem though, unnatural doesn't mean bad, but it means there are no clear boundaries for it. What is a reasonable length term for copyright protections? 14 years? 30 years? Forever minus a day? It's arbitrary and its set by the government. This in effect means that the government sets the price of copyrighted works indirectly. If copyrights lasted for a year, people would still go to the movie theaters, but the tickets/food would have to be much more cheap or people would just wait a year and watch it a home later.

The point I am rising is that this is arbitrary and set by the government. Compulsory licensing is no different. You can argue that you don't like it, but your justification can't be that you don't want the government imposing arbitrary limits on the people because you already *want* the government imposing arbitrary limits on the people, as long as you agree on any set term length.

Re:Linux Workaround

[Dynedain]

A reasoned, though-out answer that I can appreciate. Couldn't you have posted that the first time instead of a vulgar insult? Profanity in the form of a personalized attack doesn't help your argument.

You're lucky

[phantomfive]

Only to discover that Amazon has taken away my ability to watch entirely in the name of Digital Restrictions Management.

You're lucky, they saved you from watching the horrible things. It was an act of mercy.

Re:You're lucky

[mattyj]

Supanatural was the only one really worth watching. That thing with John Goodman and The Onion one were both the worst 5 minutes of TV I've suffered through.

Re:You're lucky

[ubrgeek]

Funny, those were the only two I liked. The cast of the first worked quite well together (although the smarmy character who joins at the end was a touch too smarmy) and if you like The Onion humor as well as things like Police Squad then the second is perfect.

Re:You're lucky

[wonkey_monkey]

Funny, those were the only two I liked.

I know, right? It's almost like different people like different things.

Re:You're lucky

[rudy_wayne]

Only to discover that Amazon has taken away my ability to watch entirely in the name of Digital Restrictions Management.

You're lucky, they saved you from watching the horrible things. It was an act of mercy.

Exactly. It's horrible crap. As bad or worse than anything the TV networks are producing.

http://www.itworld.com/personal-tech/353540/amazon-debuted-eight-original-comedy-pilots-and-i-sat-through-almost-half-them

Re:You're lucky

[dwye]

Exactly. It's horrible crap. As bad or worse than anything the TV networks are producing.

Of course. If they were really any good, they would have been picked up by a real network. Remember, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."

Re:You're lucky

[sesshomaru]

Yes, but they've also prevented me from watching Farscape, and I'm going to go farbot from a lack of puppets!

Well, ok, sure I could dig out the DVDs, but it's so inconvenient!

Roku

[Anonymous Coward]

For all the time you spend messing with Linux setups and devices, a $100 Roku 3 will last you a decade and save you time and shelf space.

Re:Roku

[jedidiah]

> For all the time you spend messing with Linux setups and devices, a $100 Roku 3 will last you a decade and save you time and shelf space

The only thing that Roku will buy you is the extra shelf space. It will still be an inferior device despite being a 3rd generation unit. It will still be unable to handle it's own content decoding and be inferior to a 6 year old HTPC in this regard.

I have an HTPC that's older than the entire Roku line and it's still more capable than any ARM appliance once you get past the whole proprietary DRM thing.

A Roku is a nice supplement for an HTPC, not a replacement for one.

Re:Roku

[Rude Turnip]

A Roku box is a great front-end that eliminates the need for an HTPC. Why should I care about where decoding takes place in order to enjoy something? That is being pedantic. It streams from every major video provider (Netflix, Amazon, MLB.tv, etc), and I can stream videos & music stored on my desktop via Plex.

Re:Roku

[Rich0]

For all the time you spend messing with Linux setups and devices, a $100 Roku 3 will last you a decade and save you time and shelf space.

Uh, I don't think it will work sitting on my lap in my car, like my Nexus 10 will.

And unless I mess with a bunch of converters/etc it won't let me watch TV on my monitor on my desk while browsing the web at the same time on that monitor.

About the only thing the Roku will help with is plugging it into your living room TV. However, I'm sure it lacks half of the MythTV feature set, which makes it yet another box. I'd likely buy a Blu-ray player with Amazon support before I go that route...

Re:Roku

[EzInKy]

Will this Roku allow me to plug in my 4TB portable hard drives to them and allow me to view the content that I purchased and ripped to them?

Re:Roku

[EzInKy]

That would lean me towards purchasing one, my TV and current BR player won't read such large drives.

Re:Roku

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

The Roku 3 supports FAT16, FAT32, NTFS and HFS+ drive formats. My guess is that your other devices only support FAT32? That would make the maximum volume size 2 TB for FAT32, IIRC. Assuming full implementation of NTFS and HFS+, your drive should work. I'd check with Roku first, though. Also, I have no trust of USB standards implementation, so I always use external power on something like hard drives, and I swap out the wall warts every 5 years or so (lost the greatest phone ever made to a bad wall wart).

To the A.C. troll below, I would say that, yes, there are additional products to accomplish the same purpose, but the Roku is best device of all those devices. Given Roku's business model of not requiring to get between content providers and viewers, and their excellent record of updating firmware for old devices, I expect that the Roku is the best value for some time to come.

Re:Roku

[fat_mike]

I have one and its the size of a hockey puck. I used Velcro to attach it to the TV stand, you can't even see the HDMI and power cord. I'd love to see your facts about how it is inferior. BTW, I had a three PC Slackware MythTV running in my basement with nine Hapaugge 1600's in my basement for three years before I discovered the Roku. I'd rather I spent $75 on my Roku 2. Free is not always better.

Re:Roku

[hairyfeet]

So the answer is beyond simple, just pick up an OEM copy of Win 7 HP and if you really love Linux so much you can dual boot, problem solved. Hell HTPCs are the ONE and ONLY ONE use where I can say Windows 8 is actually good, those fat ass tiles that are so irritating on a desktop are easy as hell to hit with a remote and it makes a nice 10 foot UI for widescreens and on both you can use XBMC as a front end if you really like that UI, personally I prefer WMC but whatever floats your boat.

The only ones that don't have a choice is the Android users which surprise! Was the whole fricking point, sell Joe and Jane Average a kindle over an Android...which I bet works damned well, i bet the sales of kindle will get a bounce after this thus showing what I've been saying for years which is that DRM works great if your goal is to steer consumers where you want them to go. Stopping piracy was a red herring to keep the public from having a shitfit as they couldn't just say "We want to steer you by the nose and this makes that easy" without John and Jane public naturally getting pissed, so making a bogey man named piracy and blaming it all on the bogey man worked out wonderfully.

Re:Roku

[skillrod]

Unless you're just learning Linux it's not really about time, it's more a question of why pay for something twice?

Lots of folks have pleanty of power to stream content on their existing rigs, buying more shit is just not cool. I speculate this is all because Roku is in bed on the deal, some form of kick back must be in play. (xbmc is just a little to good for this sort of thing to continue.)

Too bad you can't easily write an Amazon review for their Prime service the way you can for their other products, caus this product just turned to junk.

Re:Roku

[Nutria]

But can it see the hundreds of (legal) movies and TV series served via DLNA by my PC?

Yes, but only via an obscure plug-in. WD sells similar kit that does more than the Roku3 for only $25 more.

Re:Roku

[elcano]

Can you stream from your Plex server even if you don't have connection to internet? I don't think so. Roku's business model consists on capturing everything that you watch. That is why they don't support regular DLNA. If they can't spy it is not supported.

Re:Roku

[Rude Turnip]

Of course I can. My Plex server is in my home office and streams over my home network.

Re:Roku

[elcano]

I don't use Plex (I refuse to install just another media streaming server app in my NAS just for the Roku) but all the DLNA Roku apps that I have tried require registration via Roku's web page (even when my NAS is internal) . This is completely unnecessary with other DLNA clients. Roku's insistence on registering even private channels with them is extremely suspicious and unacceptable for me, so I use other DLNA clients instead. The only explanation are ridiculously stupid design or desire for spying on the media that you watch (man in the middle, just as bit.ly does). I vote for the second one.

Simple solution

[RedBear]

Simple solution: Stop giving Amazon money if you don't like their service.

Re:Simple solution

[Opportunist]

Not buying at Amazon is illegal now? Wow, how much did that law cost?

Re:Simple solution

[sjwest]

Actually trying to give amazon money is hard as a linux person.

Short version of the story is about a book reviewed here on slashdot.

Only available in kindle, physical copies non existant unless you import it - i asked did the kindle reader 'app' work in linux Answer back was no as i was in the wrong region. A kindle was also more than it would cost to import the book from a foriegn land.

Six months later i find a physical book in a charity shop in my region. I dont plan on buying a kindle now.

Libraries can also be brilliant places and are worth supporting.

Re:Simple solution

[tnk1]

Not buying at Amazon is illegal now? Wow, how much did that law cost?

$42,344,343.07

There was a 2 for 1 in the Senate this week.

Re:Simple solution

[Opportunist]

Damn, and I missed it. Why didn't I get the memo?

Re:Simple solution

[shentino]

I think you missed the part where DRM nuked access to stuff that had *already been purchased*

Voting with your wallet doesn't work if they already have your money.

Re:Simple solution

[nandhp]

Kindle Cloud Reader works with any recent version of Chrome or Firefox.

Re:Simple solution

[sjwest]

The amazon staff where unsure of that and the geolocation issues. I got a 'forget it'. when i enquired

Buying a drm and limited e-reader to one shop is not my idea of progress.

Mind you perhaps with amazon recruiting people who define that windows or mac the only platforms is an issue

Wow

[Synerg1y]

I was gonna call the guy who wrote this a complete moron, except for this...

http://forums.androidcentral.com/tablet-apps/239022-amazon-prime-video-app.html

http://betanews.com/2013/04/22/why-is-there-no-android-app-for-amazon-instant-video/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed+-+bn+-+Betanews+Full+Content+Feed+-+BN

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000645111

We're missing something here namely something like this: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.netflix.mediaclient&hl=en

Yep, there doesn't appear to be an Android app for amazon prime. So either Amazon is telling android users to f off, or they're unaware of the issue they'd cause with DRM.

Annoyed yet? It's available for iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/amazon-instant-video/id545519333?mt=8

Re:Wow

[Creepy]

Or try WINE on Android if it exists yet and try the Windows version (heard it was in development, probably nowhere near ready for prime time though)...

Re:Wow

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Well this is what I think is basically a dick move on the part of Amazon, namely taking the Android platform, making it their own, and then giving the finger to those who provided it to them for free to begin with. I knew this was going to happen the minute they launched their app store, even expressed that it was a dick move, and got shouted down for it wherever I brought it up.

Anyways, I'm actually thinking about letting my prime subscription run out. They charge sales tax in my state now, and where I live it is pretty close to 10%. (They keep increasing it because they say they need more money for firefighters and education - though I'm trying to figure out how they didn't manage that back when it was 6% only a decade ago. Raising the rate to compensate to lost out of state purchases doesn't help because people will just want to do that even more.) Fry's electronics will price match just about any website out there, so I can get their prices locally anyways. Although Amazon's larger selection is nice, I can probably manage just fine with the free super saver shipping when I need to. If there's a hot deal somewhere, I'll just go to a website that doesn't charge sales tax.

Re:Wow

[Hallow]

Yes, they are and have been telling Android users to f off. If you want to use Android to watch their videos, you have to use their bastardization of Android.

Kindle and Amazon VOD can go suck an egg.

Re:Wow

[h4rr4r]

Windows version is going to be x86, so that will run terribly on a smartphone.

Re:Wow

[X0563511]

Amazon doesn't get to choose the tax rate. Complain to your local government.

Re:Wow

[jandrese]

And Flash is already slow on X86 machines. Emulated CPU on smartphone hardware to do realtime video decoding and decrypting is, well, it's not going to work.

Re:Wow

[bored]

though I'm trying to figure out how they didn't manage that back when it was 6% only a decade ago.

I don't know what state you live in, but if its like the one I live in the answer is easy and its three fold.

First the population of the state is expanding fairly rapidly, but the laws on new development don't require the developers to pay for the privilege of adding to city services (water/roads/electric). So, everyone moving into town is effectively subsidized by all the existing residents. Sure they have been paying for these services elsewhere, but they didn't bring them with them and they are left rusting/underutilized in places like Detroit.

Secondly, the state itself has been reducing business and franchise taxes as fast as possible. This in turn is reflected in the state paying a smaller percentage back to the communities for education/infrastructure/etc. The local communities then turn around and do the only thing they can, raise sales and property taxes and in many communities its insufficient to make up the shortfall.

Thirdly, the police forces have been expanding nationally at a frightening rate, and they are becoming significantly more expensive. 20 years ago police choppers, SWAT teams, armored vehicles, infrared cameras, etc were unheard of. Now every 3rd rate city in the country has a minor army. We don't even need the national guard anymore because the police force is like a second military. Combined with the fact that the police unions are the only unions in the country that haven't been destroyed by the 'R's means that its likely average salary for the officer handing out tickets is significantly above the salary of the general population. So the city budgets are overwhelmingly paid to the police departments. Librarians get laid off, and the police get a raise.

Re:Wow

[houstonbofh]

And they are all telling Linux users to piss off... Even paying Linux users... Hey Idiots! I have money over here! More actually since I didn't spend it on Windows Licenses or anti-virus subscriptions.

Re:Wow

[lgw]

They keep increasing it because they say they need more money for firefighters and education - though I'm trying to figure out how they didn't manage that back when it was 6% only a decade ago

In most places this claim is actually true, just not complete. They need the money for pension plan payments for firefighters and educators (and less appealing government workers of all stripes). Only a decade ago pension plans were still funded under the illusion that the 80s-90s run-up would go on forever. Now reality has intruded, and in some places (like Alameda county CA, where I used to live) pension costs are about 100% of revenue, leaving nothing for ongoing operations. Oops.

Re:Wow

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Google did exactly that.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/144804-google-attempts-to-stymie-android-fragmentation-by-locking-down-the-android-sdk

Now keep in mind that this is for the SDK and not AOSP itself. Amazon is going to have a difficult time taking android in a separate direction if they can't modify the SDK.

Re:Wow

[AK Marc]

Yup. Texas introduced the lottery to "pay for education" and it goes 100% into the general find because the educational funding from the general fund was cut as the lotto made money. There was no new money for education, but lots of money for other things.

Kind of the how budget cuts are reductions to expected rates of increase rather than strict numerical reductions. This is how the rates can keep increasing.

That's mostly semantics. Al Gore did "create" the Internet because he crafted the legislation that took it from a government-owned private network into the Internet we know and love. And a reduced increase is a cut. If the cost of widgets goes up by 20% so you buy 90, rather than 100, you cut the number of widgets you have this year vs last year, but at the same time paid more for widgets this year. So is that a 10% cut or an 8% increase? Or both?

Decade long dearth of any good television?

[dstyle5]

Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire, Justified, Mad Men and Homeland are a few of the terrible shows I've watched in the past decade. Thank goodness for Amazon coming "rescue" us from this tripe!

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[Anonymous Coward]

Add to this The Wire, Sopranos, Arrested Development, The Shield and for those who candy-like television, Dexter. All this stuff was TERRIBLE.

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[dstyle5]

Sarcasm detector on the fritz old chap?

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[MondoGordo]

Dude ... he was being sarcastic ... jeez!! * note to tech world we really need a sarcasm font !!

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[Billy the Mountain]

Oh yeah, those are all rotten. To add insult to injury there was Archer, Suits, Shameless and Game of Thrones as well!

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

You're probably the kind of person who doesn't get sarcasm. Moron.

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[Dahamma]

People keep saying that (and that "there is no way to express irony/satire on the Internet") but literary satire isn't a new thing, it's always been a form of writing that required a bit of thought to process. Plato, Swift, and Voltaire didn't use emoticons and they managed.

For every half-wit who didn't get it there are still many more like you and me who appreciated it as is. Don't dumb it down for those people!

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[Anonymous Coward]

The BBC used to be the gold standard, but no longer.

Since Blair listened to the whisperings of the Murdoch Empire (in relation to getting (re)elected from 1997 onwards), the BBC has been starved of cash, divested of income streams and forced to "commission" material from independent producers, material for which they don't have access to once the contracturally agreed number of repeats has been exhausted. All to "level the playing field" in favour of youknowwho. A few weeks ago, the BBC even lost their huge purpose-built television studios at TV Centre so the way back is nigh on impossible.

Of course, Blair started the rot, but subsequent governments have just continued with the new status quo. (How apt, its a three chord trick...)

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[Dahamma]

And for sit-coms, Community, Big Bang Theory, Scrubs, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Family Guy, among other piles of crap. And so as not to forget British contributions to this disastrous decade, there's The IT Crowd, The Office, Coupling, The In Betweeners, ...

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[Anonymous Coward]

And The Soup, which took awful TV and made something hilarious out of it, or did until it ran out of steam, anyway.

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[jones_supa]

I was going to suggest Comic Sans MS, but then I remembered that it is being used for serious science announcements these days.

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[drummerboybac]

Big Bang theory is painful. Why is there a laugh track every 10 seconds. Makes it damn near unwatchable.

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[Seumas]

To be fair, Dexter actually *is* fucking terrible. The first two seasons were fantastic. The rest was stupid pandering idiotic crap that made it even worse than Tru Blood (and that's saying something).

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[NatasRevol]

No, we just need ridiculously literal people to get off the internet.

Most of us actually get written sarcasm.

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[Dahamma]

Actually is has a live studio audience. Of course they remix the audio tracks in postprocessing but it's generally the people in the studio laughing. Monty Python also used a live studio audience, big deal.

Though I have to admit while the show was fairly original/unconventional for prime time when it started, like most sitcoms it doesn't take more than a few years before the writers start to run out of steam...

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[matrim99]

While your plan may be admirable to many, I fail to see how you can expect people to "get off the internet". The Internet is not a physical thing that people can climb onto and off of; it is a collection of logical 1s and 0s that have no tangible physical presence.

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[NatasRevol]

Step off my electrons, jackass!

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[crossmr]

While AMC and HBO create some decent shows, british TV still kicks all kinds of ass.
Broadchurch, which just ended yesterday was quite impressive, there are at least a dozen to two dozen series every year which are very good.

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[kermidge]

No, what's needed are literate people. People who read, read widely and with occasional depth. If one reads, one acquires the ability to see sarcasm and satire fairly readily. Sometimes an author will deliberately write on such a fine line that it becomes almost in in-joke to differentiate. Rather like a higher-level pun or something. (I ain't smart enough to figure that part out.)

I recall the stat circa '77 or earlier that less than half the adults in the U.S. read books. I can't imagine that has improved since then. Right now, among my acquaintances, less than 1 in 20 seem to read anything beyond the odd newspaper or magazine.

Maybe it's the unsophisticated humor displayed but it also seems to me that there's quite a few teenagers here. How many of them do you know that can read at all?

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[oobayly]

I think it's more a contextual problem - Plato, Swift and Voltaire didn't publish 20 word quips, so their readers had enough to go on to realise it as satire. Here, it's very easy to come out with a comment - which would be easily detected as sarcasm in verbal conversation - that gives the reader very little to go on.

However, in this case I agree that it was quite clearly sarcasm. Just sometimes it's not so easy - I've been caught out before, and others have been caught out by my comments. If anything, it's made me think about what I write - I tend to think "will anyone actually get whether I'm not serious?"

One example I have is the following (it was in relation to an article about photographers having photos deleted by police misusing S.44 of the terrorism act in the UK):

Please run a poll
Which concerns you more when visiting London?
a). Being blown up whilst using public transport
b). Being stopped by police under S.44 for taking a tourist photo of a "possible terrorist target"

I thought it was obvious that I was parodying the "Oh no, Al Qaeda are going to kill me in my bed fear that was going around", but the majority of people told me to go back to reading the Daily Mail as they thought the question was loaded towards (a). In fact one person told me:

Please save such vacuous remarks for your sycophants at the Daily Fail. They'll love you all the more for it. Thank you.

When I think about it, I use the big brother icon with the post, so it should have been even more obvious that I was more concerned about Rights rather than Terrorism. In that case it doesn't reflect well on people I like to think as the sane ones.

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[cundare]

Dexter, Game of Thrones, The Americans... v. what 10 years ago? The last gasping seasons of Battlestar Galactica?

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[Dahamma]

I think it's more a contextual problem - Plato, Swift and Voltaire didn't publish 20 word quips, so their readers had enough to go on to realise it as satire. Here, it's very easy to come out with a comment - which would be easily detected as sarcasm in verbal conversation - that gives the reader very little to go on.

How about Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, Mae West, WC Fields. Kings and queens of the 1 line satire... in fact I imagine they would all be masters the Twitter quip. Of course, in that case people should *expect* to see satire. But even so, I can't believe the number of nitwits who insist on complaining about posts on The Onion's Facebook page, for example...

Anyway, I agree it's not always easy, but it is possible. Usually (on slashdot, at least) for every person who doesn't get it there are many more who do. I'm ok with that ratio... and in fact the knee jerk misinterpretations usually make the joke better ;)

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[AK Marc]

The fact that most of those are boring formulaic crap not any better than the Simpsons makes the sarcasm indistinguishable from idiocy.

Re:Decade long dearth of any good television?

[AK Marc]

However, in this case I agree that it was quite clearly sarcasm.

But it could have not been. The shows listed are critically acclaimed, but I didn't like any of them (well, Mad Men is one I've never seen due to their limited distribution). The fact they are asserted to be good here on a regular basis was about the only clue.

Ran into a similar problem myself.

[AlphaWolf_HK]

If anybody recalls:

http://ask.slashdot.org/story/13/03/07/1947228/ask-slashdot-dealing-with-flagged-channels-for-xbmc-pvr

I haven't found a solution to the cablecard problem yet, but so far in what little free time I've had, I've been working on improving an automated bittorrent based solution I already have. Perhaps you should do the same.

Re:Ran into a similar problem myself.

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

I haven't found a solution to the cablecard problem yet, but so far in what little free time I've had, I've been working on improving an automated bittorrent based solution I already have.

Please share whatever you've come up with in a Slashdot submission, whether it's just a combination of programs, something you wrote yourself, shell scripts, or etc. -- it'd doubtless help others even if we're not tackling the exact same situation, and I'd be surprised if you didn't get at least a few suggestions for handling whatever weak points you feel it has.

Article troll

[Picass0]

>"Perhaps the decade long dearth of any good television is nearing its end!"

Excuse me, but there's some damn good TV in the last ten years, including but not limited to:

Sons of Anarchy
Game of Thrones
Doctor Who
Boardwalk Empire
Battlestar Galactica
Justice League Unlimited
Dexter
Spartacus

Re:Article troll

[ArsonSmith]

Yea, I'd almost call the last decade some of the best TV ever. Although it is also some of the worst. I think prior it was much more overall mediocre so now that there is so much utter crap it hides that there is still some of the best. It's like going to Home Depot and complaining that you can't buy decent 2x4s any more. Sure you can you just have to go to the lumber yard to get them, not the mass market craptastic one stop shopping spot.

Re:Article troll

[HuntingHades]

Of course, half the shows you listed are on subscription service only channels (HBO, Showtime, Starz) and the others, except for Doctor Who are/were on cable only. Doctor Who does eventually show up on PBS in most markets, after a significant delay. There is some decent TV out there, but there's also a lot of crap, especially all the "Reality" shows.

Re:Article troll

[h4rr4r]

Netflix has all of these either on streaming or disc.
No commercials either and way cheaper than cable.

Re:Article troll

[Dahamma]

I was thinking about it, and one of the biggest factors contributing towards better TV is the lack of censorship on cable (and the expanded market for the cable shows on DVD/digital download). While it's true some of the small cable networks have made brilliant and risky bets on content that paid off, the fact that AMC, HBO, Showtime, FX, etc can broadcast whatever they want and not just what the prime-time censors let them really opens up the storytelling possibilities. Real life is not a rated TV-PG sitcom...

Re:Article troll

[Hatta]

Why is Louie not on this list?

Re:Article troll

[kamapuaa]

Well it's not like that's anything new...HBO has been doing series since the 80s. And many of the best shows remain on network TV. I think a larger factor is that serialized programs are more accepted, partly due to the popularity of TV shows on DVD.

Also, AMC and FX are censored, you can't say "fuck" on Mad Men.

Re:Article troll

[ArsonSmith]

I would say that the biggest factor is the ability to do a lot of things today cheaply that were extremely expensive not to long ago. While this has mainly produced a bunch of crap that looks good, it has also help make a bunch of good talented people able to do much more than ever before.

Re:Article troll

[dwye]

AMC and FX are basic cable, or else first tier, just like Animal Planet or TVLand. Total lack of censorship is only on HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, or The Movie Channel (or their offspring like Showtime Xtreme), or the pay-.per-view channels.

BTW, the article referred to comedy shows, which FX and AMC lack, let alone HBO or Showtime (excluding their broadcasting standup acts). Comedy has always been a spotty thing, or else NBC would still rule the air.

Re:Article troll

[Dahamma]

They are somewhat censored (more self-censored, they let some words of through occasionally) - but it's more a matter of letting them do what they want and censoring the bits they don't like - Breaking Bad has plenty of mature content, they just mute/blur some of it. And that also means it doesn't have to be censored when released on DVD or digital. Another example: try watching Comedy Central after 10pm - a few minutes of a Friar's roast and it's obvious they don't censor late night!

Compare to network shows, which (with very rare exceptions) *write* it for the censors in the first place.

Re:Article troll

[gmhowell]

So current tv is the best of times and the worst of times? Could be a new script there...

Re:Article troll

[gmhowell]

Also, AMC and FX are censored, you can't say "fuck" on Mad Men.

They are self/advertiser censored, not FCC censored, IIRC.

Re:Article troll

[Dahamma]

Watch a Friar's Roast on Comedy Central after 10pm if you think basic cable *has* to censor. If they can air Gilbert Gottfried telling The Aristocrats joke without bleeping they can pretty much air anything.

And FX has no comedies? Archer? Louie?? It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia??? And the "let alone HBO" is way off... Dream On, Sex and the City, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Eastbound and Down, Girls, Flight of the Conchords, Mr. Show with Bob and David, and many others...

Re:Article troll

[ArsonSmith]

He meant other than those and the many others, they don't have any comedies.

There is - it's called a Kindle Fire

[SuperKendall]

Yep, there doesn't appear to be an Android app for amazon prime.

Welcome to what happens when the company that controls your content stream also provides hardware.

There's no other Android client because Amazon would much, much rather you buy a Kindle Fire to watch Amazon Prime with.

I've been wondering how much longer there will be an iOS version... but at the moment the desire to gain viewers overrides the desire to force hardware sales.

Re:There is - it's called a Kindle Fire

[Rob Y.]

It's pretty nasty when a company 'giving away razors to sell blades' starts trying to make money off of the razors too. The Kindle was originally Amazon's way to jump-start their ebook and streaming services. Now they want to be a tablet player too. Greedy.

Re:There is - it's called a Kindle Fire

[aaaaaaargh!]

Your attempt at being sarcastic failed, because there is not much positive to say about the razor/razor blade business model (or the bubblejet/ink cartridge business model for what it's worth).

Re:There is - it's called a Kindle Fire

[smi.james.th]

I don't know about this. There's a Kindle android app. Also, I don't know how much of a profit they make on a Kindle fire. So there's that to consider...

Re:There is - it's called a Kindle Fire

[Darinbob]

The kindle was always full of DRM, and is a perfect example of why the ebook concept as it is now is broken. It is designed to give Amazone complete power. If they accidentally sell you a real book that they don't have permission to sell, they would be forced to eat the costs and chalk it up as an expensive mistake; but if it's an ebook they can just yank it back.

Books need to be tied to the reader while it is active I think, to allow publishers to peace of mind that they won't be pirated. But once the book gets on the reader it should be made so that it can never be yanked off again, and that backups can be made, and that you can lend your copy to other people, or even sell it to other people. DRM goes beyond piracy prevention in that its goals are to prevent those activities I just listed. Piracy is not prevented or even slowed down by DRM, only the law abiding consumers are hurt by this. It continues to amaze me that so many consumers will so easily accept DRM or even go so far as to defend it.

Re:There is - it's called a Kindle Fire

[sgtrock]

Getting off topic here, but this is why I don't download directly from the B&N store to my Nook. I buy online through my PC, download it there, then read it on my Nook. I also tend to buy books that are DRM free or use tools that will let me read my ebooks however I want. Calibre's plug-in architecture makes this possible.

It's like they want you to pirate...

[earlzdotnet]

They basically give people who aren't 90% of users the middle finger. Use Linux? that's too bad, live without or pirate it. We don't want your money

I think this is especially pitiful that they are doing this with their own shows they are now producing. It's not even the MPAA demanding them to DRM everything to license it, they are stupid enough that they are doing it for the hell of it..

Re:It's like they want you to pirate...

[houstonbofh]

Obviously, the divisions don't talk. The idiot in charge of the streaming division aught to ask the guy in charge of AWS if ignoring Linux users is a money making idea...

Re:It's like they want you to pirate...

[im_thatoneguy]

Because clearly the same sort of people who would want to run a large distributed web application are the same people who would also spend millions of dollars on TV shows but only if it streams to a laptop which doesn't have Windows or OSX.

you cant take something away

[nimbius]

the majority of linux/unix users have never had. netflix has never warmed up to GNU, and thats just fine for me. ill hit TPB, download the latest excretion from hollywood, judge it based on its merits and if i like it, ill buy the blu-ray version. if i dont like it, 'rm' works nicely and if its a star-wars prequil, 'unlink' and a half pound of thermite has so far proven slightly effective.

Re:you cant take something away

[h4rr4r]

Netflix works on linux. Not as great as on windows, but it does work. Wine running firefox and silverlight.

Re:you cant take something away

[jfengel]

if i like it, ill buy the blu-ray version

I'm curious about what level of "like" that requires. I has teh Netflix, and I never buy movies because there are practically no movies that I want to see more than once.

I know that other people do actually buy movies, so apparently there is a market for that. What percentage of things that you download do you like well enough to buy the Blu-Ray? If you decide it's not up to scratch, do you generally shut it off halfway through, or do you generally watch it all the way through before deciding it's not worth your contribution?

I apologize for being nosy. I'm just curious.

Re:you cant take something away

[Anonymous Coward]

Netflix works on linux. Not as great as on windows, but it does work. Wine running firefox and silverlight.

Oh, wow, now all I need to do is punch myself in the nuts and eat a pile of shit to complete the experience.

Fuck that.

Re:you cant take something away

[stewsters]

XCode runs on Linux, if you install virtualbox and install a hackintosh image. That doesn't mean that its a good or even pleasant idea.

Re:you cant take something away

[houstonbofh]

the majority of linux/unix users have never had. netflix has never warmed up to GNU, and thats just fine for me. ill hit TPB, download the latest excretion from hollywood, judge it based on its merits and if i like it, ill buy the blu-ray version. if i dont like it, 'rm' works nicely and if its a star-wars prequil, 'unlink' and a half pound of thermite has so far proven slightly effective.

But I had Prime Streaming, and now I don't... I never had NetFlix... Between the active Linux blocking, and the stupid pop-up ads, I was never much inclined to use them.

Re:you cant take something away

[emag]

Having *just* in the past few weeks gotten a Blu-Ray player, these are the movies I've gotten:

* Original Star Trek movie collection (daily deal on Amazon, and what spurred me)
* Next Gen Star Trek movie collection
* Galaxy Quest (to be inserted in the above rotation at the proper point)
* Ghostbusters (it was less than $10)
* Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, Army of Darkness, My Name is Bruce

I'm pretty sure that's all I have. I usually just use Netflix as well, but those are movies that I either enjoy watching over, will do a marathon of, or are great for putting on for background noise. We're planning to marathon the Star Trek this summer while pigging out on steamed crabs, which is easily a 8-10 hour activity for us.

Re:you cant take something away

[h4rr4r]

It works.
It plays video, what more do you want?
There is even an ubuntu ppa if you need hand holding.

Re:you cant take something away

[jfengel]

Thank you.

Don't feel bad

[TWiTfan]

Try running OS2/Warp for a while and see how they treat you!

Competing with piracy

[sinij]

Unfortunately without locking both platform (walled garden) and distribution DRM is futile. Why unfortunate? Because inevitable conclusion of all failed DRM is not to open it up and monetize, but to build more walled gardens.

Idea that DRM only has to defer casual pirates is an intellectually bankrupt idea - defense has to be breached only once for the information to become freely available. As such it inevitably turns into vs. Internet battle, and Internet always wins.

The only sane thing to do is to compete with your content based on merits - provide it on demand, at high quality and at low price. Some will always pirate and some will always pay - but majority will go with whatever is the most convenient.

Capitalize on laziness and stop building walled gardens!

Consumers using Linux

[a_big_favor]

I never expect end user products to work on anything Linux. Maybe it's narrow minded or pessimistic. I hope you do convince Amazon, but this rant on slashdot is preaching to a choir. Quit giving them your money and do something other than talking to tech/customer support.

Re:Consumers using Linux

[i kan reed]

Having something you already paid for stop working is pretty reasonably within the category of "newsworthy corporate bullshit." If there's any evidence at all that amazon is going to pull the rug out from under me on the things I already bought the moment it becomes profitable, I'd like to know to stop buying the moment it happens to someone else, not when it happens to me.

Re:Consumers using Linux

[phantomfive]

If there's any evidence at all that amazon is going to pull the rug out from under me on the things I already bought the moment it becomes profitable, I'd like to know to stop buying the moment it happens to someone else, not when it happens to me.

Then you should be forwarned now, anything with DRM will likely be pulled out from under you. It's a matter of when, not if.

Re:Consumers using Linux

[cbhacking]

Oh, by all means, complain away. However, anything you "purchased" that comes with DRM, that should have been the exact moment you had all the required "evidence" you speak of. It doesn't matter if it was formerly easily-broken DRM unless you went through the effort to break it and make your own un-DRMed copy at that time; if they go beef up the DRM I don't really see how you can blame them for not warning you.

Stop supporting the purchase of DRMed goods. Breakable DRM is still DRM, it's just DRM that the company hasn't yet bothered to fix. They'll get around to that in due time. You're a fool to expect otherwise, and a fool to support them in the first place.

Re:Consumers using Linux

[sdreader]

In my experience people are happy to put up with some DRM (Steam) as opposed to others because it's somehow "better", so even if your broad statements has merit (which I believe it does), it will fall of deaf ears when it comes to gamers.

Re:Consumers using Linux

[phantomfive]

Yes. And I can understand, because sometimes I fall for the temptation too. I just accept the fact that at some time in the future, I won't be able to play that game anymore. It's frustrating, but my desire to play the game wins the fight (sometimes).

Re:Consumers using Linux

[sdreader]

There's always the third option I suppose: pirating (torrents). You get the game and it's without DRM, so it's yours forever no matter what happens. Technically it's the best outcome for the end users, but it's also a tiny bit illegal. I suppose one could just buy of Steam and get the torrented version (or just a crack), thereby fulfilling the monetary exchange and remaining morally sound. But it'd still be considered illegal unfortunately even if you did the right thing.

Re:Consumers using Linux

[phantomfive]

Yeah, that used to work. Now companies are figuring out how to do part of the processing on their servers, so if the servers go down, the game becomes at least partially broken.

I really try to resist buying DRM games, and I'm mostly successful. In fact, there's only one game series with DRM that I can't resist buying.

Re:I had a great experience...

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'm sure you are enjoying Windows 8 too.

Amazon is like Flaming Moe's...

[gosand]

Business huh? You just lost yourself a customer
$$ cha ching .. what's that Homer?
YOU JUST LOST YOURSELF A CUSTOMER MOE!
$$ cha ching... what?.....

TWYTBAKF

[P-niiice]

They Want You To Buy A Kindle

Re:TWYTBAKF

[P-niiice]

forgot the damn fire

Re:Not right

[achbed]

Why shouldn't I be able to stream on any device I own?

Because the device you have is not one that's locked down to Amazon's standards, and doesn't provide them with the consumer information they're looking for. Please purchase an approved device to enjoy your content better. I mean at all.

Re:Not right

[Jafafa Hots]

"They cannot reasonably justify preventing their customers from accessing content they paid for."

Corporations don't have to reasonably justify anything.

Re:Not right

[GameboyRMH]

Amazon has always had a major boner for DRM, you need to install some shitty DRM-ridden client app for any digital goods you buy from them. At least they haven't gone fully-curated and tried to get everyone on Amazon hardware...yet.

flamebait

[phantomfive]

Isn't this quote kind of flamebait: RMS cultists and pragmatic Windows users alike now suffer equally. And the folks who aren't GNU/Hippies with an anti-cloud-chip-on-their-shoulder might even be suffering more: they've lost access to shows and movies that they purchased.

Doesn't that basically mean the 'cultists' were actually being pragmatic? Or maybe this post is an attempt at irony?

Re: Flash is crap ...

[Toast or Rice]

Strong finish there, good work :)

Taken Away

[FuzzNugget]

Kind of like Slashdot editors have taken away my ability to read a summary?

Retro-active

[DrYak]

The problem is that, according to the story's poster, the change not only affect new pilots, but also all the old previously bought and previously accessible content.
Suddenly, all the part services which you did like and for which you gave money, stops working too.

Re:Retro-active

[Darinbob]

That's the major problem with DRM I think. You do not own the material that you mistakenly thought you purchased, instead you purchased temporary permission to access the content, and this can be rescinded at any time for any reason. Since the affected people are in the minority the complaints will be happily ignored (they think you're criminal scum anyway for not using properly approved devices).

Re:Retro-active

[Anonymous Coward]

Heinlein quote:

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.

Re:Retro-active

[Bam_Thwok]

I don't buy this argument. People bought their $5 digital copies in lieu of the $20 blu-rays under pretty explicit terms. That $15.00 difference is not just savings from absent physical production passed onto the consumer; it's the forfeiture of your right to physical ownership, substituted instead for Amazon's right to shut the service down or reorganize the service as they please. This might be a terrible way to treat customers, but it's certainly not as though those customers have been robbed of their property.

Re:Retro-active

[houstonbofh]

The problem is that, according to the story's poster, the change not only affect new pilots, but also all the old previously bought and previously accessible content. Suddenly, all the part services which you did like and for which you gave money, stops working too.

That is something I still do not understand. How is it that making an unauthorized copy of something without payment is theft, but depriving me of paid for content is not?

Re:Retro-active

[Karl Cocknozzle]

That is something I still do not understand. How is it that making an unauthorized copy of something without payment is theft, but depriving me of paid for content is not?

It was in what was formerly known as "the fine print," and is now colloquially referred to as the "Terms of Service." The one advantage "fine print" had over "ToS" was that a company generally couldn't change their "fine print" very often, and if they did, they'd have to inform their customers of said change in writing, which would be expensive (think stamps, paper, and envelopes, and man-power to fill, seal, address, and affix stamps to them) not to mention that the idea that one party can unilaterally re-write a contract "after the fact" is a relatively recent addition to our jurisprudence.

With ToS they just insert a clause that says "or anything else we choose to add later" and your only recourse is to stop using the product--immediately--if they institute a change you don't like.

Re:Retro-active

[Luckyo]

This is a problem inherent to the streaming, or more generally "service" model. You don't "own" anything. Not even access to the files. If at any point company decides to not offer the service to you, they are free to do so and you will lose access to everything when that happens.

Re:Retro-active

[interval1066]

Apparently Heinlein never met the MPAA.

Re:Retro-active

[devent]

No, the problem with DRM is that a) you are assumed to be a dirty pirate even if you pay and b) it takes your rights away.

a) Even if you play the game and pay for the video or music, the distributor assumes that you are a dirty pirate anyway and you will share it with your friends (yes you are a dirty pirate if you share with your friends) or seed it in Pirate Bay. So the distributor needs to restrict your rights like in b)

b) for DRM to work a part of the hardware or software needs to be restricted from you, the user / owner. So even you pay for the Intel Core i8 and the Nvidia Geforce XXL, a part is restricted from you and you can't access it. The restriction will affect your rights like video recording, time shifting and format shifting, fair use rights and so on. Even with TV it's perfectly legal to record the shows and watch them later.

Re:Retro-active

[Darinbob]

That's because your rights are in conflict with corporate desires, so clearly your rights need to go away.

Re:Retro-active

[NatasRevol]

Shhhh, stop making sense.

"Those who would exchange rights for a price cut whine when it comes back to bite them in the arse." - Ben Franklin

Re:Retro-active

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are you buying new movies for $5? That's the online streaming rental price! The purchase price for digital is normally around $15, and we all know sooner or later, the DRM built into the players is going to fail or the service will end, or the company will go tits-up.

Re:Retro-active

[deadweight]

I pay $1.99 to watch shows on Amazon. I have a good memory, so I never need to go back and watch them twice. If it was something I wanted to watch over and over I would buy the damn DVD.

Re:Retro-active

[Applekid]

The problem is that, according to the story's poster, the change not only affect new pilots, but also all the old previously bought and previously accessible content.
Suddenly, all the part services which you did like and for which you gave money, stops working too.

There's a reason why you don't make deals with the devil.

Re:Retro-active

[GrumpySteen]

The people who modded this as insightful are morons. That quote has absolutely nothing to do with the situation with Amazon.

Amazon implemented DRM that broke some customer's access. They are not asking courts to guarantee profits, nor are they asking customers for more money to fix the DRM problem.

The Heinlein quote does not apply in any way, shape or form to the way that Amazon has screwed some of their customers over.

Re:Retro-active

[houghi]

Just because it is legal doe not mean it is just.

It should not just be a terrible way to treat a customer, it should be illegal.

Re:Retro-active

[Khashishi]

That kind of "contract" sounds likely to be invalid due to unconscionability.

Re:Retro-active

[shentino]

Simple. You're not a corporation.

Re:Retro-active

[shentino]

I don't give a shit WHAT rental prices are. A deal is a deal and just because it's digital doesn't magically give Amazon the right to take away something that's already been paid for.

If you want a sounder argument, invoke Amazon's ToS or something. Economics has nothing to do with the legality.

Re:Retro-active

[VortexCortex]

No, the problem with DRM is that a) you are assumed to be a dirty pirate even if you pay and b) it takes your rights away.

I get where you're coming from, but that's not the problem with DRM. The problem with DRM is that it doesn't affect pirates or piracy, only the folks who actually tried to "legally" get the content. Ergo: It serves only to degrade paying customer's experience and make piracy look like a better option. That's why I say, as a content creator, DRM is just dumb.

Re:Retro-active

[Rich0]

That kind of "contract" sounds likely to be invalid due to unconscionability.

Sounds great - why don't you spend $30k on a civil suit against Amazon over access to your $5 movie? Chances are that after you've spent the first $1k they'll just mail you a check for $5 so that your damages go out the window.

Re:Retro-active

[Karl Cocknozzle]

That kind of "contract" sounds likely to be invalid due to unconscionability.

Sounds great - why don't you spend $30k on a civil suit against Amazon over access to your $5 movie? Chances are that after you've spent the first $1k they'll just mail you a check for $5 so that your damages go out the window.

Yep, that's the scam: "Suuuuure you can assert your rights in court..." Granted, a good lawyer experienced at suing high-class scum like this will pre-emptively include language indicating the legal fees they've already incurred are part of their demand for damages and also include language that beyond the issues of damages, the litigation is also about contract law... Makes it harder for Amazon to seal off the suit with a $5 check, since the damages are beyond the $5 fee.

Even with HAL

[nicodoggie]

I've installed HAL in my Arch box just to see if it'll work, and nope, it still doesn't.

Not in Firefox with the last supported Flash for Linux that uses NPAPI (11.2.202.280), nor on Chromium, with Pepper Flash (11.6.602.171). hald is running and everything.

Why don't these guys learn from Steam? Make an effort, and they get some of the most loyal, most vocal platform zealots money can never buy; shun them, they get the most rabid haters.

I seriously hope Amazon reconsiders this move. I was this close to actually paying for an Amazon Prime subscription, but since I won't be able to stream on my PC (which solely runs Linux) nor on my phone (Android 4.1), they just lost a potential loyal customer to piracy (I downloaded Zombieland and Alpha House through TPB).

Re:Even with HAL

[gstoddart]

Why don't these guys learn from Steam? Make an effort, and they get some of the most loyal, most vocal platform zealots money can never buy; shun them, they get the most rabid haters.

I think you've just answered your own question.

Clearly the Linux fans are fickle, hard to please, and demanding. And in the end, they'll probably still be rabid haters.

So why spend the resources to try to keep that smaller, more vocal group happy, when you can focus on the ones who will be less easily riled up?

Just sayin'. If companies mostly perceive Linux users like you describe, how could they not decide it's the crazy fringe of people they aren't going to try for?

Sadly, where they are now the copyright owners, they've gone down the road of deciding they want to lock everything down and sell only on their terms, and what we might want is irrelevant.

Re:Even with HAL

[VGPowerlord]

Pepper Flash may not be working due to an issue with the 11.6 Flash releases. At least Flash 11.6 has problems with Amazon video on Windows, I just assume it's a multi-platform problem.

This is what I've been talking about

[jones_supa]

Internet video is broken in many ways in Linux at its current state.

Re:This is what I've been talking about

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

It seems to me that it's primarily just DRM-infected video that's a problem, or possibly the distro/browser you're using. I'm using an 8-year-old laptop with Simply Mepis 11 + Firefox & Opera, and just about any video site without DRM seems to work fine for me. ("Just about" because Opera becomes borderline unresponsive if I try to view porn videos using it.)

Re: I can watch amazon just fine

[alen]

The shitty kindle fire hd is the most popular android tablet on the market followed by the Samsung tablets

The Asus and the nexus all share the single digit percentages of the market

Well done, Amazon.

[wvmarle]

We must be grateful to Amazon for this kind of issues, really.

It annoys the hell out of many people - and that's a good thing here. More and more people learn the dangers of DRM. Now even people with legitimately purchased content are blocked from watching their stuff; and I think that's a good thing.

The only thing that can stop and really overcome the DRM cancer from growing is this. People getting burned, and getting burned badly. They get angry, they talk about it to their friends, who may also have gotten burned. The anger spreads, and friends talk to friends and mention what happens and warn about the dangers of DRM. Content buyers start to look more critical at content vendors: do they sell it with or without DRM? If with DRM, should I take the risk of losing my money? Is there an alternative, another vendor that sells it, without DRM? And in that case I just have to hope for the content providers that these people don't resort to using The Pirate Bay.

Who cares?

[Tau Neutrino]

Theater is life. Film is art. Television is furniture.

Decade long dearth?

[Seumas]

Claiming there hasn't been any good television for the last decade is fucking idiotic. If you haven't found good television, it's because you've had your head in the sand. I don't even have or watch live television (I ditched cable ages ago) and I'm sure I have missed a lot of other things to add to the list, but in the last decade, you have had some really great shows from pretty good to great:

Battlestar Galactica
Doctor Who
Sopranos
The Shield
The Wire
Friday Night Lights
Breaking Bad, Mad Men
Sons of Anarchy, Firefly
Arrested Development
The Office, Sherlock
Luther
Game of Thrones
Fringe
Boardwalk Empire
Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Archer
The IT Crowd
Walking Dead
Louie
Justified
Community
Eastbound and Down
Californication
Deadwood
Oz
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Venture Brothers
Lost
Futurama
Eureka!
Farscape
Blood in the Wire
Alias
The Killing
Mythbusters

There's a lack of great science fiction stuff out there, but there's still a lot of great programming to be found, if you bother.

Re:Decade long dearth?

[Seumas]

I should clarify that I meant the shows in my list vary in quality from pretty good (Lost, Alias, Eureka!, Walking Dead) to great (The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc) -- not that the list is, itself, ordered or ranked from good to great.

Re:Decade long dearth?

[LesFerg]

Eureka! is for idiots too stupid for Sci Fi that want to pretend to be Sci Fi fans.

How can you say that? At least 50% of the events/effects in each episode are caused by electromagnetic field fluctuations, 25% are something to do with sonic resonance, the remainder of the problems and/or solutions involve the word "quantum", and occasionally they even threw in the word "gravity". Ok, so there was lots of fiction... maybe it should be called Sigh Fi.

So the cycle continues...

[Borgmeister]

Back to bit-torrent then for many I should imagine, if they tighten the screws people will slip through the gaps. There I was thinking we had just reached a happy equilibrium.

Re: I can watch amazon just fine

[Ignacio]

You're confusing "popular" with "good" or even "worth considering". Don't feel bad though; it's a very common mistake, right after "I didn't see that sign" and "I thought pulling out would be good enough".

Customers have choice!

[spaceyhackerlady]

Customers have choice. If you make content available under reasonable terms, they may be your customer. If not, they won't. I decided a couple of years ago that the cable company's terms were unreasonable, so I cancelled my cable. With over the air HD, internet streaming and DVDs, I don't miss it.

While many tv shows people have mentioned are from U.S. cable tv networks, I've seen top-quality stuff from other sources. Recent faves include Borgen and Scott & Bailey, both from "regular" (albeit European) TV channels. Who would have thought Danish parliamentary democracy would make such gripping drama? And Janet and Rachel can arrest me any time they like. :-)

I've watched Borgen on DVD, and am currently streaming S&B on youtube. When ITV get around to releasing series 3 on DVD I'll buy it. Reasonable terms, remember.

...laura

Re:Customers have choice!

[thunderclap]

That's how I addicted to continuum and Dance Academy. One is produced by Shaw media in Canada, the other ABC.co.au. Both are far better than some of the stuff available here.

Amazon is the Wal-Mart of the internet

[waspleg]

They are evil fucks. They have always been evils fucks. They will continue to be evil fucks.

Stop voting for them with your wallet, and shrink their evil.

Hippies: join up

[Catbeller]

I see the little slams against RMS "cultists", silly programmer hippies and similar software flower children that the right-wing millennials and Gen-Xers love to dismiss as fools. Because Hippies.

But the reason Stallman and the open software movement despises DRM was shown to you, precisely, when your "rights" disappeared.

So, who's the fool? As usual, as in the support for civil rights, the fight against wars started for lies, the rejection of Victorian sexual repression, the rejection of environmental destruction, and all the other things that Hippies were despised for, the Hippies were god damned right and everyone else was wrong, wrong, wrong. So that's why the hate, really.

If you'd have listened to the hippies, there'd been no Vietnam, no Iraq, no Afghanistan, and computers that would actually do what they are told to do by their, you know, actual owners. Instead of a PC, you now have a set-top DRM box, pretending to be a PC, managed by the powers-that-be, among whose number you will never be counted.

Re:Hippies: join up

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

If you'd have listened to the hippies, there'd been no Vietnam ...

I agree with your overall message, but our government started sending soldiers over to Vietnam in the mid-50s, while the countercultural movement didn't get started until the early '60s, with the main bulk of the anti-war activity years later. Also, just to be fair, the hatred of hippies is more of a right-wing & libertarian issue rather than specific to Generations X & Y/Millenials -- there's certainly more than enough right-wing/libertarian Boomers that are just as hateful.

I was about to get really pissed off...

[airdweller]

...but then I remembered I had Amazon VOD on my TV.

One would think if they can make it work on one Linux-based device, it shouldn't be too hard to do the same for other Linux-based devices.

Obvious answer is obvious

[Charliemopps]

This is why you don't pay for media.
My wife's iPod recently decided to just stop syncing with her windows desktop all together. iTunes has always been the worst of the worst in music management but now it's just dead to her. I'm sure I could reinstall windows for the 10th time, but shes just done with it and wants to be rid of it. It especially irked her when it tried to "Sync" with her camera every time she plugged it in and randomly erased photos...
So I ordered her a new MP3 player with the same amount of memory and features for $35 (her iPod was $200) so she was happy... then she asked "How do I get all this music I bought off of it?"

YOU PAID FOR MUSIC?!?!?

Then I had to explain she didn't actually "buy" anything at all. Downloaded her entire music collection in about 5min (took me an hour to look it all up) and I guess that's piracy even though she paid for it. Go figure.

Don't pay for media. You're just asking to get screwed.

Nice try

[DMiax]

So, with that in mind, I finished up editing Slashdot for the day and sat down to watch some of these new pilots.

Nice try, but we know you were wanking. Next time say you're sky-diving, designing the next Mars rover, or banging a supermodel. At least we know that there is someone doing those things.

Re:Dup story - it's still on the front page

[EzInKy]

That story doesn't explain why one day I could view Amazon prime videos and the next day I couldn't. If I weren't so honest, I'd consider just saying FU and start pirating like so many suggest. Instead I'll probably go out and buy a new BR player that supports their DRM scheme. I know one thing for sure though, I won't be ordering it through Amazon after this dick move.

BTW, anybody know of BR player that supports the 4TB drives that I ripped all my DVDs too?

Re:Not right

[cbhacking]

Oddly enough, that's actually not quite true. They were the first major digital download retailer to offer DRM-free MP3s from major labels. They still do it, in fact, although since everybody does it now that's less of an incentive to use them than it used to be. There was a period of a year or two where every song I purchased came by way of Amazon, though.

Unfortunately, aside from their moderately enlightened views on music, nearly everything else is DRMed to hell. There are apparently DRM-free Kindle ebooks on their store, but only in situations where the author explicitly requested no DRM (for example, if they're using a CC license).

Workaround

[daboochmeister]

About 2 weeks ago or so, I stopped being able to watch any Amazon Prime video on my Ubuntu 12.10 box. I was fine previously, after installing HAL and disabling the Pepper flash plugin in Chrome, so the Adobe plugin was used. But suddenly, with Flash 11.2.202.280, it didn't work.

After experimentation, I found that video viewing was re-enabled by back-leveling to an earlier Flash plugin version. Instructions here.

Can't try it till tonight, but hopefully that workaround is effective still. Minor edit to the instructions, I later tried the plugin version right before 11.2.202.280 (can't recall the number) and it worked fine ... probably better than back-leveling all the way to 10.1, like I mentioned in those instructions.

fixed it

[v1]

But so far the response from Amazon has simply been: it was never supposed to work, and we've fixed it.

In the absence of a clear response from Amazon,

That looks pretty clear to me. You just don't like the answer so you're refusing to listen to / accept it as an answer.

This wasn't supposed to work. You found a loophole and were using it in a way they neither intended you to nor wanted you to. They closed the loophole. You need to deal with it from that angle, not "they broke it and it's their responsibility to fix it", because they didn't, and it's not.

Re:So fucking gay

[welsh git]

*woooosh*

Thanks for the irony overload!

Re:Dup story - it's still on the front page

[Bert64]

By purchasing a player that works with their DRM you are showing them that their customers will put up with that shit, and that they can screw you even more in the future.

Re:Dup story - it's still on the front page

[EzInKy]

I haven't spent a penny on software for years. For good hardware I have spent many a decent penny.

Gee..

[houbou]

Won't work on DOS 6.2.2 either.. WTF?? Doesn't anything last?

Amazon's Hosting O/S?

[guitardood]

Wouldn't it be terribly ironic if Amazon was using Linux internally, taking advantage of the hard work of the open-source community, only to shun them away from using any content being generated?

Perhaps another clause is needed in GPL?

I tried a friends Amazon Prime account earlier this month on XBMC. It worked great and had some content of which interested me. So much so that, last evening I signed up for Prime, only to find today that I can't even use it. Oh well, so much for the 30-day trial.

Re:Amazon's Hosting O/S?

[Rich0]

Perhaps another clause is needed in GPL?

It already exists - the GNU AGPL v3 clause 13. The problem is that little FOSS uses the AGPL.

Re:They "own" the content but I own the money.

[jones_supa]

If amazon wants my money they need to have a local storage model where I can download once and view as many times as I want offline, on any device I own. And it needs to work w/ linux as easily as possible.

You know that's not gonna happen. A more reasonable thing to ask would be functional online-only viewing on Linux.

Right now thanks to private trackers I have every tv show and movie ever made at my fingertips for free, pretty much immediately after it "airs" the first time. Amazon and netflix are competing against that and they aren't doing a very good job.

Amazon might only interpret that as the piracy numbers rising, and they will make sure to keep the DRM turned on in future too. Resorting to piracy is ambiguous anyway -- you can send a much stronger signal if you could carry your money to some other provider that gives you better hardware/software support.

All money from Fire is in tie-ins

[SuperKendall]

Also, I don't know how much of a profit they make on a Kindle fire.

It's not so much that they make money on the Fire. It's that once you have one:

1) You are renting movies and watching video from the Fire, all from Amazon.

2) You are buying and using Kindle books.

3) You also are buying apps from the Amazon app store.

4) Presumably you will make use of the Prime membership and order more physical goods from Amazon (I have Prime and it's very true that it has that effect).

Re: I can watch amazon just fine

[Ignacio]

But it already works that way. Self-appointed elitist assholes flood information channels with what they think should be consumed, and the masses in turn consume it. We simply need elitist assholes that have a different goal.

This is why I keep using Windows

[sdreader]

This is why I keep using Windows. Despite preferring Linux for (some) technical and ideological reasons, ultimately Windows is always going to be the first-tier platform for a lot of companies to support, Mac second and Linux often not even on the radar. Doesn't matter if the content is always good or not, at least having the ability to see said content is better than being without. Apologies for any flamewars.

I don't think this is limited to the pilots

[sjflory]

I suspect this is being rolled out on all new shows. I had similar issues with Game of Thrones last week. But I have to to hand it to Amazon I set them an email nicely asking if there was any way to watch it on my Nexus or Linux box. Or if they could refund it. The result 3 messages over the space of a day no you can't watch on Android, try this on Linux (didn't work), and here is your money back. Sure it sucks that I could not get Amazon Instant video working on Game of Thrones, but the end result is I have my money back, and I'm likely to remain a customer. Of course I'll most likely wait until the DVD comes then buy it used or borrow it from a friend. Sad how DRM actually causes a loss of sales to the content owner....

Ubunut 10.0.4 worls

[belg4mit]

Amazon is being particularly uncool about this. When I submitted a ticket this weekend I got a message back a day later thanking me for my suggestion that they add support for Android, when the point was thay it had already been supported!

Fortunately(?) streaming is working on my desktop with FF17 under Lucid Lynx (the previous LTS).

Amazon's Flash videos...

[antdude]

Is this why my secondary CRT TV goes blank black when watching Amazon's videos in dual screens set up? :(

I suspect

[blogagog]

I suspect that this is not a problem for anyone but a minor chunk of Slashdot readers. Who bothers with linux anymore? I supported you, but the war's over and you lost. After 20 years, Linux still sucks. It sucks just like Unix did. It's why we abandoned both of them. They suck. It's time to give up and move on to something that may be of value to the masses. Unix sux. OS2 sucks. CP/M sucks. Grow up and get over it. I won't be offended when you vote my comment down. It's expected from true believers in unix/linux.

Re:I can watch amazon just fine

[deadweight]

I love my Kindle. As a way to read books and watch Amazon video content it is superb and all the other stuff it does is a bonus. I never ever thought I was buying a general purpose computer and neither should anyone else.

Amazon set-top box announced...

[cosmicvibes]

This might explain it a little bit: http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-is-planning-to-release-a-set-top-box-for-video-streaming-2013-4

Credibility, Lost

[ffejie]

You lost your credibility in the second line:

Perhaps the decade long dearth of any good television is nearing its end!

In chronological order, an abbreviated list:

• Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000)
• The Shield (2002)
• The Wire (2002)
• Arrested Development (2003)
• Deadwood (2004)
• Battlestar Galactica (2004)
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005)
• Lost (2006)
• 30 Rock (2006)
• Friday Night Lights (2006)
• Dexter (2006)
• Big Love (2006)
• Mad Men (2007)
• Breaking Bad (2008)
• Parks and Recreation (2009)
• Party Down (2009)
• Community (2009)
• Louie (2010)
• Downton Abbey (2010)
• Homeland (2011)

Yeah, it's been a pretty crappy decade. (Any show listed before 2003 had a significant number of episodes in 2003 and beyond.) There are a lot of people out there that feel that this is the new golden age of television.