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Amazon To Cease Sale of Apple TV and Chromecast
Mark Wilson writes: As of 29 October, shoppers will no longer be able to buy Apple TV or Chromecast devices from Amazon. Citing compatibility issues with Prime Video, Amazon emailed marketplace sellers to inform them it is not accepting new listings for the two media devices, and any existing listings will be removed at the end of October. The move indicates not only the importance Amazon places on its streaming Prime Video service, but also that it views Apple and Google as serious rivals. The two companies have yet to respond to the news, but it is unlikely to be well-received.
Check out amazon family library aka The Amazon Household Program.
"Family Library lets you share Kindle books, apps and games, audiobooks, Kindle Owners' Lending Library benefits, and Prime Instant Video streaming across your Amazon devices and Kindle reading apps after linking your Amazon account to that of another adult in your household. Each adult chooses what they want to share: they can share all of their Kindle books, apps, and audiobooks, or they can choose to only share individual titles."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/...
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
What something to replace the Amazon Fire TV and Amazon Fire TV Stick that have been out... since April 2014 and November 2014 respectively?
I'm surprised it hasn't happened earlier.
The problem is actually Amazon's DRM system.
Amazon Prime uses Adobe FlashAccess for it's DRM to prevent copying of rented and purchased content (forget that I could just hook up an LVDS emulator as my "LCD Display" and copy it all anyway).
ChromeCast and Apple TV don't support FlashAccess because they don't support Flash.
On the other hand, I have a friend who just bought a Samsung TV on clearance, and it's Amazon Prime video quit running because it started demanding that the Flash version be updated in the TV, which would be great, but it's an embedded system with no way to do that without updating the browser, and Samsung is somewhat notorious for not updating hardware once it's been sold.
Mostly because it would cost them their ability to write firmware for a new television set, were they to take their television team, and put them on updating an older product that they're not even manufacturing any more, and that won't get them into the consumer's wallets anyway, unless they started charing about half the cost of a new TV for the firmware updates.
Amazon needs to drop their proprietary system, or insist that Adobe (1) quit changing their DRM implementation, or (2) provide the updates as plugins that *can* be downloaded to any TV, based on the fact that they are running ARM processors. #2 is problematic, since a port of Chrome is the browser used on most of these (the source code costs Samsung nothing), and Chrome quit supporting non-sandboxed third party plugins not purchased through the Chrome App store and/or Google Play.
So Amazon is pretty screwed here.
The amazon video app is only in the amazon app store, not the google play store. But as far as I know, this is amazon's choice. They want to encourage android users to install the amazon app store so they can sell apps to the users; their video app is a carrot.
I recently tried to get the amazon video app. After 30 minutes of apps pointing at web pages pointing back at the same apps, I deleted the amazon app store and decided that I didn't need to watch amazon prime videos after all.
This is a dick move by amazon, but it's well within their rights. If they want to try to prop up their video service by not selling competing products, no problem; both apple and google have online stores.