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Comment by thatthatis | Hacker News Reader

I've been a prime customer for 7 ish years. I'm ok with the new price. Im extremely happy with the service, appreciate a lot of the new features (instant video, lending library), and overall Im not off put by tweaks like add ons that make the service more economically efficient and thus viable.

I get way more than $100 worth of simplicity from being a member of prime.

My only complaint: create an instant video app for android already.

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My complaint is: Why do I have to install Silverlight on my Mac to use amazon video while you can stream to your iPad without silverlight?

DRM. Until HTML5 standardizes DRM across browsers, these sites relying on DRM won't be getting rid of Silverlight and Flash.

Incidentally, Netflix has started using HTML5 instead of Silverlight/Flash, but only on Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 8.1, since HTML5 DRM extensions are available on that platform: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/159960-netflix-switches...

On the iPad you don't have to install Silverlight, but you do have to install the proprietary Amazon Instant Video app -- so it's not exactly a better situation. They could replace Silverlight with a Mac app called "Amazon Instant Video" and that wouldn't make the situation any better. In the end, they need a streaming video client that supports DRM that the movie studios approve of.

Additionally, as is mentioned, they also support Flash on desktops, which most people already have installed. However, the Flash streaming is not as great -- it most-likely uses RTSP, an older stateful streaming protocol, versus their Silverlight client likely uses Smoothstreaming (or similar), a HTTP-based adaptive streaming format.

I have no idea if it affects which videos are available to watch free, but there is an option under settings to use Flash videos instead of Silverlight. I stumbled upon it the other day while doing some troubleshooting.

Are you talking about Netflix? Amazon's video player uses Flash.

No, Amazon uses silverlight by default. Under their options for web player, they even say "Experience less buffering and enjoy HD titles with Microsoft Silverlight." and the option is "Silverlight (Recommended)"

Ah, I wasn't even aware since I don't have Silverlight installed, and Amazon automatically fellback to Flash. I installed Silverlight to compare, but it crashes in Chrome and I get "Content Permissions Error (6023)" in Firefox.

Because they have a competing OS called Fire OS.

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